Tejaswini Niranjana
Biographic Data
| ID | 408986 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tejaswini Niranjana |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tejaswini |
| FAMILY NAME | Niranjana |
| SIGNATURE | NIRANJANA T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lingnan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5052-3000 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 72 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Hong Kong: Dating apps, political activism and the neoliberal subject
Through an ethnography with college-going women between the ages of 18 and 24 across 8 publicly funded universities, we examine the formation of digital subjectivities of Hong Kong young women against a backdrop of neoliberalism and a fast-changing socio-political environment. We analyse the multiple transformations that occurred in their relationships with friends, families and lovers through digital mediation. Our cohort has experienced the ant…
Gendered modernities, neoliberal subjects: Aspirational cities in inter-Asia perspective
Digital mediation is the context in which we propose to look at the aspirational lives of young women in Asia’s neoliberal cities. However, this context emerges out of longer histories of social change through which gendered modernities have taken shape. Modernity within non-Western contexts, we propose, unfolds in uneven and distinctive ways, whether the society in question has been formally colonised or not. To understand contemporary transform…
Digital intimacy: Young women in inter-Asia
The Introduction lays out the context and the concepts that undergird the multi-sited inter-Asia research project concluded in 2022 on college-going women and digital intimacy that is the basis of this special issue. We draw on the frameworks of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies to argue that inter-referencing, through multiplying reference points across our four sites within the region, orients our research through local/national/global routes that no…
Crafting Lives in Music: Women Vocalists in Early 20th-Century Bombay
A significant development in Indian classical music during the early 20th century was the emergence of women trained in the vocal genre of Hindustani raga music. 1 The city of Bombay, now Mumbai, which was growing in importance as a commercial centre in western India from the mid-19th century into the 20th, was a locus for this transition. As more and more women aspired to professions in the performing arts, the conditions under which they could …
Digital intimacies: Friends, lovers and families in contemporary Asia
How do young women understand and experience intimacy in the age of social media, and are their experiences qualitatively different after the millennial turn and the rapid expansion of digital technologies? What impact do these digital experiences have on how millennial subjects experience, understand, and negotiate social relations in globalising Asia? Here are some preliminary findings from a multi-sited ongoing research project which looks at …
Orientalismo e depois: O impacto sobre a teoria feminista na Índia
No presente ensaio a autora aborda a introdução e impacto do pensamento de Edward Said no cenário de emergência dos estudos feministas modernos na Índia. A crítica ao orientalismo aparece como vetor da reorganização dos estudos de gênero e da crítica literária naquele país, os quais até então profundamente influenciados por ideologias colonialistas e agendas nacionalistas
Iacs roundtable to mark the publication of Tejaswini Niranjana’s Musicophilia in Mumbai
Tejaswini Niranjana is one of the important Indian cultural theorists. In Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious, she examines the emergence of Hindustani classical music in Mumbai, bringing together the notion of sociality and subjectivity to throw light on an important aspect of how publics are formed in the non-western metropolis. The roundtable joined by Professor Niranjana and the other five scholars tou…
Pandemic musings in inter-Asia
Like the rest of the world, Asians have been living through extraordinary times in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic is still raging in many parts of the region, disrupting entire economies, families, public as well as private life, and schooling. The inter-Asia cultural studies project fundamentally depended on actual connections between scholars and activists across the region, made possible by easier boundary-crossings under globalisation. In the ne…
Deewaana (the mad one): The lover of music
The notion of deewaanapan or madness (as in being crazy about something) is deployed in this essay to make sense of musicophiliac behaviour in twentieth century Mumbai. I argue that new insights into the formation of ‘publics’ in the non-western metropolis can be gained through a focus on phenomena that embody ‘social subjectivity’. A major phenomenon of this kind is the devotion to Hindustani or North Indian classical music which spread through …
Musicophilia and the lingua musica in Mumbai
Hindustani art music in the metropolis of Bombay/Mumbai played a significant role in the fashioning of both selves and public spaces from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. With the fall of Awadh in northern India in 1857 and the dispersal of the court that had inherited Hindustani music from the Mughal empire, the singers, instrumentalists and dancers began to migrate in search of new patrons. Many of them found a foothold in Bombay, whic…
De l’importance de la culture pour repenser le langage féministe
Montrant comment la question de la culture a été une partie importante non seulement de la vie des femmes mais aussi des récits de la nation, du langage et de la politique dans le contexte indien, cet essai milite pour l’étude des éléments particuliers qui forment les modernités de l’Asie et des traductions qui participent à modeler les idées, les descriptions et les pratiques y afférant. Centré sur la relation entre le genre et la culture, l’art…
English education in the Indian multi-lingual classroom
The paper gives an overview of the situation of the Indian higher education classroom post-1835 with a special focus on the use of English. It analyses the social and intellectual consequences of the ‘lack of English’, and through engagement with two case studies involving Kannada and Hindi reflects on the problems surrounding higher education resources in Indian languages. The paper concludes by offering a roadmap for a much-needed intervention …
Why culture matters: Rethinking the language of feminist politics
The Inter-Asia Project, not least as it is exemplified in the IACS Journal, has enabled a variety of stimulating conversations across Asia. One such productive site of engagement with ‘Asian’ questions has been feminism. Although there are strong women’s movements in many countries in the region, they often deal by necessity with local issues (unless there are crossborder aspects involved, as in the case of sex-trafficking or migrants), and it is…
Teaching gender studies as cultural studies
This essay examines a moment of institutionalization in cultural studies, and argues that questions of gender have a significant place in this interdisciplinary domain. The issue is discussed in a pedagogic context that has almost normalized feminism, seeing its political contributions as belonging to the past. The essay argues that the conceptual conjuncture of culture and gender which has been central to feminist theorizing in India needs to be…
Feminism and Cultural Studies in Asia
This paper marks significant moments in the trajectory of cultural studies in Asia in relation to feminism. It begins by contrasting the relationship of feminism and cultural studies in Western contexts such as Britain, where feminism disrupted a prior field, to feminism's foundational relationship to cultural studies in many Asian contexts, including India. The paper goes on to speculate on the nature of the unique link between culture, the nati…
Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad
Alternative frames? Questions for comparative research in the third world
This paper is dedicated to the possibility of creating a critical space for ongoing conversations between intellectuals in different third-world locations. Prompted in part by my own journeys to the West Indies, these reflections will focus on the need for such conversations in our contemporary historical-political context, where the old boundaries are being erased and redrawn, and where the traversing of geographical distance has become, in a se…
Mirror politics: Fire, Hindutva and Indian culture
With the immediate danger of a possible ban now behind us, it may be useful to look at 'Fire' more carefully and raise certain questions in the context of the recent controversy and acclaim. Shouldn't we go beyond identifying good and bad images of women to investigate the critique of patriarchy that a film like 'Fire' provides, and the characterisation of the feminist self that it makes available
Left to the Imagination: Indian Nationalisms and Female Sexuality in Trinidad
Contrary to appearances, this essay is not about Trinidad or the West Indies; it is primarily an attempt to alter the lens through which we have been accustomed to viewing or framing the emergence of that discursive subject, the modern Indian woman. In analyzing the formation of woman in India, we often use, almost as though by default, the implicit comparisons with Western or metropolitan situations. I want to ask whether our frameworks might lo…
Feminism and Translation in India: Contexts, Politics, Futures
This article suggests that discussion of linguistic translation in postcolonial contexts would help open up larger questions of cultural and political representation. The space of translation is seen here not as one in which a clearly demarcated concept is approximated to by its equivalent; rather, it is a space in which the translator simultaneously negotiates different kinds of languages. Understanding this interweaving of languages might be im…
Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender
Suddenly 'women' are everywhere. Development experts name 'gender bias as the cause of poverty in the third world'; population planners declare their commitment to the empowerment of Indian women; economists speak of the feminisation of the Indian labour force. Over 1991-92, for instance, upper-caste women thronged the streets in the anti-Mandal protests; the BJP identified women and dalits as the principal targets of their next election campaign…
Interrogating modernity: Culture and colonialism in India
Indian Culture' has inevitably meant in our Context the monuments of antiquity, the temple sculpture of a glorious past, the texts of ancient scriptures, all 'the wonder that was'-but if we were to recognize culture as comprising a variety of signifying practices, perhaps we would begin to make sense of the astonishing proliferation of seemingly disparate contemporary phenomena : Hindi cinema and its star system, the rath yatra and the demand for…
Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context
Dialectic of 'Critique
Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender
Suddenly 'women' are everywhere. Development experts name 'gender bias as the cause of poverty in the third world'; population planners declare their commitment to the empowerment of Indian women; economists speak of the feminisation of the Indian labour force. Over 1991-92, for instance, upper-caste women thronged the streets in the anti-Mandal protests; the BJP identified women and dalits as the principal targets of their next election campaign…
Alternative frames? Questions for comparative research in the third world
This paper is dedicated to the possibility of creating a critical space for ongoing conversations between intellectuals in different third-world locations. Prompted in part by my own journeys to the West Indies, these reflections will focus on the need for such conversations in our contemporary historical-political context, where the old boundaries are being erased and redrawn, and where the traversing of geographical distance has become, in a se…
Left to the Imagination: Indian Nationalisms and Female Sexuality in Trinidad
Contrary to appearances, this essay is not about Trinidad or the West Indies; it is primarily an attempt to alter the lens through which we have been accustomed to viewing or framing the emergence of that discursive subject, the modern Indian woman. In analyzing the formation of woman in India, we often use, almost as though by default, the implicit comparisons with Western or metropolitan situations. I want to ask whether our frameworks might lo…
Why culture matters: Rethinking the language of feminist politics
The Inter-Asia Project, not least as it is exemplified in the IACS Journal, has enabled a variety of stimulating conversations across Asia. One such productive site of engagement with ‘Asian’ questions has been feminism. Although there are strong women’s movements in many countries in the region, they often deal by necessity with local issues (unless there are crossborder aspects involved, as in the case of sex-trafficking or migrants), and it is…
Feminism and Cultural Studies in Asia
This paper marks significant moments in the trajectory of cultural studies in Asia in relation to feminism. It begins by contrasting the relationship of feminism and cultural studies in Western contexts such as Britain, where feminism disrupted a prior field, to feminism's foundational relationship to cultural studies in many Asian contexts, including India. The paper goes on to speculate on the nature of the unique link between culture, the nati…
Digital intimacy: Young women in inter-Asia
The Introduction lays out the context and the concepts that undergird the multi-sited inter-Asia research project concluded in 2022 on college-going women and digital intimacy that is the basis of this special issue. We draw on the frameworks of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies to argue that inter-referencing, through multiplying reference points across our four sites within the region, orients our research through local/national/global routes that no…
Digital intimacies: Friends, lovers and families in contemporary Asia
How do young women understand and experience intimacy in the age of social media, and are their experiences qualitatively different after the millennial turn and the rapid expansion of digital technologies? What impact do these digital experiences have on how millennial subjects experience, understand, and negotiate social relations in globalising Asia? Here are some preliminary findings from a multi-sited ongoing research project which looks at …
English education in the Indian multi-lingual classroom
The paper gives an overview of the situation of the Indian higher education classroom post-1835 with a special focus on the use of English. It analyses the social and intellectual consequences of the ‘lack of English’, and through engagement with two case studies involving Kannada and Hindi reflects on the problems surrounding higher education resources in Indian languages. The paper concludes by offering a roadmap for a much-needed intervention …
Teaching gender studies as cultural studies
This essay examines a moment of institutionalization in cultural studies, and argues that questions of gender have a significant place in this interdisciplinary domain. The issue is discussed in a pedagogic context that has almost normalized feminism, seeing its political contributions as belonging to the past. The essay argues that the conceptual conjuncture of culture and gender which has been central to feminist theorizing in India needs to be…
Mirror politics: Fire, Hindutva and Indian culture
With the immediate danger of a possible ban now behind us, it may be useful to look at 'Fire' more carefully and raise certain questions in the context of the recent controversy and acclaim. Shouldn't we go beyond identifying good and bad images of women to investigate the critique of patriarchy that a film like 'Fire' provides, and the characterisation of the feminist self that it makes available
Feminism and Translation in India: Contexts, Politics, Futures
This article suggests that discussion of linguistic translation in postcolonial contexts would help open up larger questions of cultural and political representation. The space of translation is seen here not as one in which a clearly demarcated concept is approximated to by its equivalent; rather, it is a space in which the translator simultaneously negotiates different kinds of languages. Understanding this interweaving of languages might be im…
Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context
Dialectic of 'Critique
Interrogating modernity: Culture and colonialism in India
Indian Culture' has inevitably meant in our Context the monuments of antiquity, the temple sculpture of a glorious past, the texts of ancient scriptures, all 'the wonder that was'-but if we were to recognize culture as comprising a variety of signifying practices, perhaps we would begin to make sense of the astonishing proliferation of seemingly disparate contemporary phenomena : Hindi cinema and its star system, the rath yatra and the demand for…
Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender
Suddenly 'women' are everywhere. Development experts name 'gender bias as the cause of poverty in the third world'; population planners declare their commitment to the empowerment of Indian women; economists speak of the feminisation of the Indian labour force. Over 1991-92, for instance, upper-caste women thronged the streets in the anti-Mandal protests; the BJP identified women and dalits as the principal targets of their next election campaign…
Feminism and Translation in India: Contexts, Politics, Futures
This article suggests that discussion of linguistic translation in postcolonial contexts would help open up larger questions of cultural and political representation. The space of translation is seen here not as one in which a clearly demarcated concept is approximated to by its equivalent; rather, it is a space in which the translator simultaneously negotiates different kinds of languages. Understanding this interweaving of languages might be im…
Left to the Imagination: Indian Nationalisms and Female Sexuality in Trinidad
Contrary to appearances, this essay is not about Trinidad or the West Indies; it is primarily an attempt to alter the lens through which we have been accustomed to viewing or framing the emergence of that discursive subject, the modern Indian woman. In analyzing the formation of woman in India, we often use, almost as though by default, the implicit comparisons with Western or metropolitan situations. I want to ask whether our frameworks might lo…
Alternative frames? Questions for comparative research in the third world
This paper is dedicated to the possibility of creating a critical space for ongoing conversations between intellectuals in different third-world locations. Prompted in part by my own journeys to the West Indies, these reflections will focus on the need for such conversations in our contemporary historical-political context, where the old boundaries are being erased and redrawn, and where the traversing of geographical distance has become, in a se…
Mirror politics: Fire, Hindutva and Indian culture
With the immediate danger of a possible ban now behind us, it may be useful to look at 'Fire' more carefully and raise certain questions in the context of the recent controversy and acclaim. Shouldn't we go beyond identifying good and bad images of women to investigate the critique of patriarchy that a film like 'Fire' provides, and the characterisation of the feminist self that it makes available
Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad
Feminism and Cultural Studies in Asia
This paper marks significant moments in the trajectory of cultural studies in Asia in relation to feminism. It begins by contrasting the relationship of feminism and cultural studies in Western contexts such as Britain, where feminism disrupted a prior field, to feminism's foundational relationship to cultural studies in many Asian contexts, including India. The paper goes on to speculate on the nature of the unique link between culture, the nati…
Teaching gender studies as cultural studies
This essay examines a moment of institutionalization in cultural studies, and argues that questions of gender have a significant place in this interdisciplinary domain. The issue is discussed in a pedagogic context that has almost normalized feminism, seeing its political contributions as belonging to the past. The essay argues that the conceptual conjuncture of culture and gender which has been central to feminist theorizing in India needs to be…
Why culture matters: Rethinking the language of feminist politics
The Inter-Asia Project, not least as it is exemplified in the IACS Journal, has enabled a variety of stimulating conversations across Asia. One such productive site of engagement with ‘Asian’ questions has been feminism. Although there are strong women’s movements in many countries in the region, they often deal by necessity with local issues (unless there are crossborder aspects involved, as in the case of sex-trafficking or migrants), and it is…
English education in the Indian multi-lingual classroom
The paper gives an overview of the situation of the Indian higher education classroom post-1835 with a special focus on the use of English. It analyses the social and intellectual consequences of the ‘lack of English’, and through engagement with two case studies involving Kannada and Hindi reflects on the problems surrounding higher education resources in Indian languages. The paper concludes by offering a roadmap for a much-needed intervention …
De l’importance de la culture pour repenser le langage féministe
Montrant comment la question de la culture a été une partie importante non seulement de la vie des femmes mais aussi des récits de la nation, du langage et de la politique dans le contexte indien, cet essai milite pour l’étude des éléments particuliers qui forment les modernités de l’Asie et des traductions qui participent à modeler les idées, les descriptions et les pratiques y afférant. Centré sur la relation entre le genre et la culture, l’art…
Musicophilia and the lingua musica in Mumbai
Hindustani art music in the metropolis of Bombay/Mumbai played a significant role in the fashioning of both selves and public spaces from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. With the fall of Awadh in northern India in 1857 and the dispersal of the court that had inherited Hindustani music from the Mughal empire, the singers, instrumentalists and dancers began to migrate in search of new patrons. Many of them found a foothold in Bombay, whic…
Deewaana (the mad one): The lover of music
The notion of deewaanapan or madness (as in being crazy about something) is deployed in this essay to make sense of musicophiliac behaviour in twentieth century Mumbai. I argue that new insights into the formation of ‘publics’ in the non-western metropolis can be gained through a focus on phenomena that embody ‘social subjectivity’. A major phenomenon of this kind is the devotion to Hindustani or North Indian classical music which spread through …
Pandemic musings in inter-Asia
Like the rest of the world, Asians have been living through extraordinary times in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic is still raging in many parts of the region, disrupting entire economies, families, public as well as private life, and schooling. The inter-Asia cultural studies project fundamentally depended on actual connections between scholars and activists across the region, made possible by easier boundary-crossings under globalisation. In the ne…
Orientalismo e depois: O impacto sobre a teoria feminista na Índia
No presente ensaio a autora aborda a introdução e impacto do pensamento de Edward Said no cenário de emergência dos estudos feministas modernos na Índia. A crítica ao orientalismo aparece como vetor da reorganização dos estudos de gênero e da crítica literária naquele país, os quais até então profundamente influenciados por ideologias colonialistas e agendas nacionalistas
Iacs roundtable to mark the publication of Tejaswini Niranjana’s Musicophilia in Mumbai
Tejaswini Niranjana is one of the important Indian cultural theorists. In Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious, she examines the emergence of Hindustani classical music in Mumbai, bringing together the notion of sociality and subjectivity to throw light on an important aspect of how publics are formed in the non-western metropolis. The roundtable joined by Professor Niranjana and the other five scholars tou…
Digital intimacies: Friends, lovers and families in contemporary Asia
How do young women understand and experience intimacy in the age of social media, and are their experiences qualitatively different after the millennial turn and the rapid expansion of digital technologies? What impact do these digital experiences have on how millennial subjects experience, understand, and negotiate social relations in globalising Asia? Here are some preliminary findings from a multi-sited ongoing research project which looks at …
Crafting Lives in Music: Women Vocalists in Early 20th-Century Bombay
A significant development in Indian classical music during the early 20th century was the emergence of women trained in the vocal genre of Hindustani raga music. 1 The city of Bombay, now Mumbai, which was growing in importance as a commercial centre in western India from the mid-19th century into the 20th, was a locus for this transition. As more and more women aspired to professions in the performing arts, the conditions under which they could …
Hong Kong: Dating apps, political activism and the neoliberal subject
Through an ethnography with college-going women between the ages of 18 and 24 across 8 publicly funded universities, we examine the formation of digital subjectivities of Hong Kong young women against a backdrop of neoliberalism and a fast-changing socio-political environment. We analyse the multiple transformations that occurred in their relationships with friends, families and lovers through digital mediation. Our cohort has experienced the ant…
Gendered modernities, neoliberal subjects: Aspirational cities in inter-Asia perspective
Digital mediation is the context in which we propose to look at the aspirational lives of young women in Asia’s neoliberal cities. However, this context emerges out of longer histories of social change through which gendered modernities have taken shape. Modernity within non-Western contexts, we propose, unfolds in uneven and distinctive ways, whether the society in question has been formally colonised or not. To understand contemporary transform…
Digital intimacy: Young women in inter-Asia
The Introduction lays out the context and the concepts that undergird the multi-sited inter-Asia research project concluded in 2022 on college-going women and digital intimacy that is the basis of this special issue. We draw on the frameworks of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies to argue that inter-referencing, through multiplying reference points across our four sites within the region, orients our research through local/national/global routes that no…
Sociology (14 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · South Asian Cinema and Culture (8 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · History (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Art (4 works)