Core Faculty

Modern Hindi, Tamil, and Indian literatures; South Asia feminisms; women’s writing; literary multilingualism; world literature; translation studies; realisms, modernisms, and literary form; postcolonial studies

I am a literary comparatist focusing on issues of translation, genre, feminist and postcolonial theory, and world literature. My specialization is in twentieth-century Hindi and Tamil literature and literary history with an emphasis on how these rich traditions converse with other literatures of India and the world. I approach the study of literature through close textual reading combined with a firm rootedness in how understandings of the relationship between literature and society have changed over time. I have an enduring interest in the relationship between gender and genre and the popular and the literary, which informs my ongoing work on the comparative study of Indian and world literatures, translation studies, and women’s writing in South Asia.

My first book, The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method (Northwestern University Press 2022; South Asia edition by Permanent Black 2022) won the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies, received the ACLA René Wellek Prize Honorable Mention for best overall book in comparative literature, and was shortlisted for the MSA First Book Prize. The book explores the paradox that a single canon could be written in multiple languages, each with their own evolving relationships to each other and to English. Examining canonical Hindi and Tamil short stories from the crucial decades surrounding the era of decolonization, it contends that Indian literature must be understood as indeterminate, propositional, and reflective of changing dynamics between local, regional, national, and global readerships.            

                                 

I am currently working on two new projects. The first explores the emergence of Tamil new poetry between the late 1950s and early 1980s in relation to aesthetic frameworks built around prose and the rise of vocabularies pertaining to music and language. It proposes that new poetry was a primary avenue through which Tamil writers belonging to various literary approaches crossed ideological boundaries to draw inspiration from each other and from new poetry movements in other Indian and world languages, ultimately enabling the democratization of poetic form.

 

 A second project revisits the familiar gendered division of literary labor that situates Hindi, Urdu, and Indian English female writers as “sentimental,” “popular,” “true-to-life” realists and their male counterparts as “experimental,” “sophisticated,” “abstract” modernists. It explores how women’s representations of female experience substantiated Indian modernism’s grasp on postcolonial reality by allowing its aesthetic emphasis on abstract symbols and elusive meaning — concepts which were theorized and practiced almost entirely by men — to stake claim to the truth of universal human experience.

I was elected to the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) Board of Trustees for a three-year term during 2020-2023 and now serve on the AIIS Book Prize Committee. I was also elected to serve on the Modern Language Association LLC Forum on Literatures of the United States in Languages Other Than English Executive Committee for a five-year term from 2021 to 2026. This year I am the forum’s secretary. As a Dean’s Faculty Fellow in 2022-2023, I led the Year of Languages programming for the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences Humanities Office. I am currently conducting new research in India as a 2023-2024 United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF) Fulbright Nehru Fellow.