I am currently working on two projects.
My first book project, The Tamil Realist Novel in South and Southeast Asia examines literary realism in the modern prose form of the Tamil novel across South and Southeast Asia. It challenges reductive, homogenized views of Tamil literary production by mapping the contours of the modern Tamil realist novel as it diffuses across national and regional nodes while remaining rooted in a shared cosmopolitan Tamil identity.
The book focuses on key works of sparsely translated, twentieth-century Tamil writers such as Kaa. Naa. Subramanyam, P. Singaram, Poomani, T. M. C. Raghunathan, K. Daniel, and Sundara Ramasamy, whose stylistic contributions have yet to be recognized in the global postcolonial canon and demonstrates how they self-consciously adopted literary realism (yathārthvāthām) between the 1940s and 1980s to navigate Tamil ethnic identity in the postcolonial context. Grounded in Tamil worlds that span India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Malaysia, the book argues that realism offered a means of exploring tensions between private desires, collective identity, and political realities that often diverged from nationalist and subnational politics, such as the Dravidian movement, as well as the ways in which the contours of Tamil literary realism deviated from the conventions of the All India Progressive Writers Association, often assumed as the starting node of literary realism in the South Asian novel. This research has been funded by grants from The Townsend Center of the Humanities, Humanities Research Fellowship (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon grant), Hellman Society of Fellows, Bruce.R.Pray book workshop grant and an AIIS - NEH senior fellowship.
My second project, Post Millennial Tamil Visual Cultures assesses evolution of global Tamil visual narrative forms, its linkages to Tamil cultural modernity and gendered consumption patterns. Articles arising out of this study has been published in South Asian Popular Culture and Tamil Cinema in the Twenty First century: Caste, Gender and Technology.
Past Projects:
My doctoral project, Textual Spaces of Reconciliation: Reading Postcolonial Sri Lanka is a comparative literary project that considers the relationships between the political project of reconciliation and the creative spaces of English and Tamil postcolonial Sri Lankan literature written from 1983 -2009, during the years of militarised civil war in the island. Through an emphasis on the importance of fictional narratives to mediate violence and imagine creative alternatives to entrenched conflict, my research reveals connections among the literary activities of reading and writing, the intellectual labour involved in recognizing histories of violence, and the political work of reconciliation.
Articles based on my research on Sri Lankan literature and film have appeared in Postcolonial Text, Journal of Commonwealth Literature,
Textual Practice and as an encyclopedia entry in The Encyclopedia of Sri Lankan diaspora.
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Tamil Studies at the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. My research focuses on global Tamil literatures, postcolonial literature, and the filmic and digital cultures of contemporary South Asia and its diasporas. Specifically, my work examines narrative forms and their connections to South Asian cultural identity formations, as well as race and ethnic politics.
Before arriving at UC Berkeley, I was a lecturer of Tamil Studies in the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS) from 2015-2019.