Udaya Kumar

• Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

In this essay, bilingualism is considered as one possible locus of the Indian literary landscape. Kumar focuses on Kamala Das’s status as a bilingual writer who at the beginning of her career chose the English language for her poetic writing and Malayalam for her short stories. The author suggests that a close consideration of the economies of expr...

Why did autobiographical writings emerge in Kerala more than a century ago? What were the social, material and cultural features that motivated individuals to write personal histories and memoirs? This book shows the complex ways in which private recollections and the use of memory for loosely literary ends, also entailed the production of history...

In contrast to sectarian movements across the world that have been fundamentalist in terms of their ideology and locked in conflicts with those who worshipped 'differently', dissent movements within devotional streams were characterized by the qualities of universalism, humanism and love which cut across communal, caste and gender lines. The primar...

I see this new phase in the history of a well-established scholarly journal as offering a major opportunity. That opportunity needs to be placed in a context. There are three key elements to this context, from the point of view of the American research university and the geographies of the rest of the world. First, globalization has encouraged grea...

This essay focuses on the interventions of the Malayalam literary critic Kuttikrishna Marar (1900–1973) in debates on realism in the 1940s and '50s. The category “realism” acquired a new normative force in Kerala at this time through its association with specific sociopolitical concerns, indicated in notions of jeevatsahityam (literature of life) a...

Taking the public dimension of autobiographical writing as its point of departure, this paper examines two instances of shame in Indian autobiography, where the subject experiences incoherence and dislocation. The paper discusses the tropes of vulnerability and self-shaming in Gandhi's autobiography alongside moments of forced shaming or humiliatio...