AKAM Lecture 10

31 March 2023

Start

March 31, 2023 - 3:30 pm

End

March 31, 2023 - 5:00 pm

Address

Joan Robinson Hall   View map

Title: “Novels, writing and the making of a modern intellectual : situating O. Chandu Menon”

Abstract: Moving away from the usual preoccupation with placing Indulekha within the history of Malayalam literature, I wish to use Chandu Menon’s extant pieces of writing to track the kinds of preoccupations that he (and others like him) had in the late 19th century. My attempt here is to explore the ways of reading this rather disparate body of writing that reveal local and national sensibilities, which in turn demand abandoning neat separations between categories such as literary, political and intellectual.

Professor G. Arunima

Prof. G. Arunima is at present the Director of the Kerala Council for Historical Research, Trivandrum, Kerala. She has researched and published widely on both the historical and the contemporary contexts of Kerala and India, focusing particularly on cultural, visual and material texts, and rethinking the politics of the contemporary. Currently she is completing a monograph on the cultural history of Kerala, bringing together questions of gender, caste and power, and ways of rethinking the social. She has recently begun new work on the sensorium and subject formation, which is part of a larger book project on the history of the contemporary in Kerala.

Her publications include There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar ca 1850-1940 (Orient Longman, 2003); The Hijab: Islam, Women and the Politics of Clothing, edited with PK Yasser Arafath (Simon & Schuster, 2022); Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa, edited along with Patricia Hayes and Premesh Lalu (Palgrave, 2021); He, My Beloved CJ (translation of Ivan Ente Priya CJ, Rosie Thomas’s biography of her iconic litterateur husband, CJ Thomas), Women Unlimited, 2018.