Kaleidoscope

KALEIDOSCOPE: TO A TEACHER WITH LOVE & MUCH MORE…

by Janaky Sreedharan April 13 2025, 12:00 am Estimated Reading Time: 8 mins, 3 secs

A rich festschrift honouring Prof. GJV Prasad, celebrating his transformative impact on English literary studies in India through essays spanning drama, poetry, translation, and cultural criticism. By Janaky Sreedharan.

Published in 2024 by Routledge, From Canon to Covid: Transforming English Literary Studies in India is a landmark academic tribute to Prof. GJV Prasad, a distinguished scholar from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. The festschrift offers a deep dive into evolving English literature curricula in Indian universities, highlighting key contributions from scholars across India and beyond. With a strong focus on Indian English literature, postcolonial studies, and regional voices, particularly from the Northeast, this volume captures the dynamic transformation of English departments across urban academic hubs like Delhi, Kolkata, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad. A must-read for academics, researchers, and students invested in South Asian literary studies and the future of English education in India.

A festschrift brought out in honour of Prof. GJV Prasad, who taught for more than four decades in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, epitomises a moment of celebration, recollection, gratitude, and future promise. Put together with a lot of care by fellow academicians, including his former students, the book is an attempt to follow the intellectual footprints of a much-loved, dedicated teacher (known more popularly by the acronym GJV), his diverse interests, and pioneering moves. Thus, the festschrift, enigmatically titled From Canon to Covid: Transforming English Literary Studies in India. Essays in Honour of GJV Prasad, edited by Angelie Multani, Swati Pal, Nandini Saha, Albeena Shakil, and Arjun Ghosh, unravels a spectrum of his academic interests and personal pursuits, ranging from theatre, cultural studies, and translation to literature from the Northeastern parts of India, through a set of meticulously prepared research papers.

Foreword and Overview of Themes
The foreword, written by Suman Gupta, cites GJV Prasad himself to validate this anthology of academic writing as indicative of how English departments have transformed into sites of "significant contestations" today. Penned by some of the prominent scholars in English studies, the anthology is divided into five sub-themes: Literary Studies in India, Drama, Poetry, Translation and Fiction, Language and Context. The choice of areas under close scrutiny speaks of Prasad's own affinities as well as the new domains opening up within literary studies. The writers are a delicious mix of eminent academics, upcoming scholars, poets like Keki N. Daruwalla, and veteran translators like C.S. Lakshmi.
M. Asaduddin's closely argued opening essay on Rethinking and Resituating Histories of Indian Literature(s) sets the tone with its critical energy and earnest efforts to reimagine a different paradigm for literary historiography in India. He undertakes a long tour through diverse literary histories with their colonial, elitist prejudices and directs our attention to the consequent absences and erasures. The pertinence of the dramatic title of the book is borne out by Rukmini Bhaya Nair's remembrance of a COVID-like situation or hard times as etched in classics like Boccaccio's Decameron, Knut Hamsun's Hunger, and Albert Camus' The Plague. Despite the grimness of the theme, the chapter is leavened with optimism about literature as a mode of survival.

Meena T. Pillai tries to delve into the postcolonial implications of the pandemic, the ruptures it caused in the imperialist claims, and the way it makes space for the manipulation of capital. Mala Pandurang traces the routes traversed by diverse boards of studies in the selection of African texts in the curriculum, inclusion of which becomes a sign of tokenism, ultimately ending in the ghettoisation of African studies as electives in the syllabus.

Drama and the Contemporary Stage
In the category of drama, you have an encounter with Mahesh Dattani to look forward to, a survey and study of selected Dalit plays by B. Mangalam, and a compelling argument around dramatizing Medea in contemporary times by Anuradha Marwah. The conversation between Mahesh Dattani and Angelie Multani becomes an engaging chronicle of Indian English theatre, regaling the reader with a lot of anecdotes grounding his playmaking in the realities of theatre practice, shifts in audience sensibility, and inclusive politics.
Through a close reading of the plays of Premanand Gajvee, A. Santhakumar, and K. R. Gunasekharan, Mangalam attempts a thorough examination of the Dalit aesthetics of performance, blending activism and experimentation to express resistance and assertion. In the essay Interpreting Euripides’s Medea in the Contemporary Indian Context, Marwah persuades us to accompany her on the tour of Medea across disparate theatre spaces—from slums and factories to elite classrooms. She urges us to reflect deeply on the celebration of Medea as a protofeminist today when children's rights are being discussed more passionately than ever before.

Poetic Reflections and Translational Explorations
The section assigned to poetry begins with Keki N. Daruwalla's long and tantalizing take on poets as "decent thieves" who raid the human cultural imagination to confront crises at different historical junctures. As mentioned earlier, COVID hangs heavy and dark over this collection; and Daruwalla's moody, autobiographical rumination on the links between sonnets and epidemics (Black Death for one) makes fascinating reading. Udaya Kumar's introspection on his own process of translating Sree Narayana Guru's thought into English challenges the normative understanding of languages as stable entities and addresses translation as a practice intrinsic to our everyday linguistic activity instead of being an esoteric literary exercise.

Santhosh K. Sareen's exploration of the intricate web of dreamtime and Indigenous Australian identity comes alive through a perusal of select poems by Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Kevin Gilbert. The essay identifies land as a binding sacred factor among the indigenous tribes, a conviction shared by tribal communities worldwide. At the same time, it fails to convince when the author compares it to the "Hindu" or "Indian" way of defining the relationship between an individual and her land. We have strong historical evidence that bears out stark differences in the perception of this bond between the tribal groups and the dominant mainstream Hindu society. Moreover, it is debatable whether the notion of Mathrubhumi, as claimed by the writer, is broad enough to embrace the indigenous perspective.

Translation, Transcreation, and Feminist Interventions
The segment related to translation and transcreation has C. S. Lakshmi's charmingly titled An Equal Music, where she ponders the anxieties and fears that lurk around the activity of translation in the literary marketplace today. It is a provocative read, letting the reader in on the rather bumpy equation between the author and the translator, with a forceful plea for an equal relationship between the two. Somdatta Mandal carries the debate further with a stimulating disquisition on the crisis-ridden dynamics between the duo, citing examples from Tagore, Manto, and many others.

Radha Chakravarty draws upon Gayatri Spivak's concept of self-worlding and Tejasvini Niranjana's idea of interventionist translation as she foregrounds the feminist translations of women's writings from South Asia to fill the gaps in official history with female-specific narratives. At this point, one wonders about the thematic organisation in the book, as the grouping could have been more imaginatively designed with Udaya Kumar’s piece included here.

Fiction, Language, and the World Beyond
The fifth part, comprising articles on Fiction, Language, and Context, kick-starts with Tabish Khair's discussion of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and the reception of the uncanny elements by the students in his classroom. The discussion moves into the concept of absolute evil, how it eludes the web of language, while pausing a bit on literary ambiguity as a cultural construct. The gripping argument makes me resolve to read the novel all over again. Meenakshi Bharat disturbs deeply with her reflections on Kashmiri writing in English, taking Mirza Waheed's novel The Collaborator as a case in point. Situating the novel in a larger landscape of fictional and nonfiction writings on the trauma and struggle of the Kashmiris, the writer describes how words are used to craft an identity of a people marginalized in their own land.

Jisha Menon weaves a curious narrative around the new cosmopolitanisms organized in call centres, where a global workforce reprises certain colonial relations through linguistic impersonations. In her paper Calling Local/Talking Global - The Cosmopolitics of the Call-Centre Industry, she cruises through three global productions to examine the harrowed lives of cyber coolies whose biological clocks are customized to meet the exigencies of multinational conglomerates. Blending fieldwork and analysis of dramatic performances, the writer lays bare the workings of the insidious intent of late capitalism. And the anthology wraps up with a highly instructive piece on the emerging tradition of English writings from the Northeast by K. B. Veio Pou and Achingliu Kamei, detailing the key features, important authors, their divergences and convergences. Not to be missed is the personal note of gratitude the writers make on behalf of all the students from the Northeast in JNU, who have cherished memories of the generosity, openness, and guidance of GJV Prasad.

A Tribute to a Visionary Teacher
Which brings us to the teacher himself who is the reason behind the making of this book—a book spun out of a lot of thought and love. Published in 2024 by Routledge, it becomes a testimony to the expansion of English departments across the country beyond the colonial curriculum to make themselves relevant as perspectives and priorities change. As his former student, I can also vouch for the fact that GJV Prasad has been one among the resourceful and adventurous teachers who urged the student to look within and develop her innate intelligence, intuitive sense, and analytical skills. He reassured us tremendously with his sensitivity to the diverse backgrounds his students came from. This rich repast is a fitting, joyful remembrance of his illustrious teaching career and points towards the nature of literary discussions in times to come.