Wadhwa
Biographic Data
| ID | 58217 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wadhwa |
| FAMILY NAME | Wadhwa |
| SIGNATURE | WADHWA |
| AFFILIATIONS | SRM University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6707-7094 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Critical agendas for the areal linguistics: Locating Sindhi within South Asia
As a concept within applied linguistics, areal linguistics concerns itself with investigating the nature of structural similarities among languages produced by contact rather than by history or by genetic similarities. A critical look at its descriptive linguistic agendas reveals that the domain needs to be revisited in terms of questions of power relations and linguistic inequalities within specific linguistic areas. Such investigations reconfig…
Archiving frictions: Sindhi libraries and the struggle for belonging in India
“A Literature of Frustration and Failure”: The Anxiety of Indianness in the Making of Sindhi Literature as an Indian Literature
Studies of Partition frequently turn to literature to understand how displacement processes, among other things, impact aesthetics and representation. This article takes a broader view of aesthetics as representation: it demonstrates how turning to the literary archive of a moment and a community gives rise to questions about the politics of individual texts and literary historiography. Centered on Sindhi literature produced in India after Partit…
The Question of Script for Sindhi in India: Reflections on Postcolonial Grammatology
When Sindhi Hindus came to India after the 1947 Partition, they had little to help them survive as a community. Given the linguistic organization of states in independent India, the community has been striving to forge an identity comparable to other communities that have a state/territory they can flourish in. First, Sindhis struggled to gain recognition for their language as an official language listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution…
Provincializing Island Poetics: The Personal as the Spatial in N S Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery
Affect towards islands is a unique approach to engage with in discussions of the phenomenology of fictional islands. This affect complements the already identified tropes within island poetics: those of sensorial exploration, spatial practices, and textural detailing of islands. This article turns to a work of fiction about a fictional island based on the island city of Kochi in south India to unpack an alternative aesthetic of spatiality, the ki…
From the sthala purana to the novel: Sethu’s The Saga of Muziris as a narrative geography of the ancient Indian port city of Muziris
The narrative approach to city writing in the postcolonial world gravitates towards metropolitan spaces. The discourse around how these cities are imagined and theorized uses reference points from modernity. With the emergence of the spatial turn in literary theory and criticism, this discourse borrows from Western, postmodern sensibilities to define cities and their narrative possibilities. In contrast to these sensibilities, regional variations…
Kochi: Provincialising Postcolonial Metro-Cosmopolitan Spatialities
There is much to learn about how some locales come to be deemed as more cosmopolitan than others. Mumbai is hailed as a cosmopolitan city and even a model for India. With an increasing sense of disappointment about the decline of cosmopolitanism in such metropolitan cities, there is a need to look at what other locales can offer as alternative models of cosmopolitanism. This article addresses Kochi as a locale that is nuanced with precolonial pra…
The rise (in the fall) of Cochin: Provincializing metropolitan spatiality in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh
Indian fiction and critical engagements with it have a metropolitan bias. The preference for representations of big cities such as Mumbai in fiction means that non-metropolitan ("provincial") spaces in India face neglect, literary and otherwise. This article argues for provincializing Indian fiction by exploring non-metropolitan locations as imagined in works of fiction to unpack alternative spatialities. The example offered is Salman Rushdie's T…
Love as Enlightenment and Enlightenment as Love: Reading Feminist Hermeneutic of Reconstruction in Vanessa R Sasson’s Yasodhara and the Buddha
Exercises in feminist theology outside Western contexts and outside of discourses of theorisation can prove to be enriching to address the disconnection between secular and religious feminisms. One way to address this disconnection is to locate the intersection between secular and religious feminisms in the space of fiction. While mytho-fiction about the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, has been around for quite some time and has be…
Cochin in Sethu’s Aliyah: Provincializing Jewish identity
An interest in Jewish topographies involves looking at Jewish presence in locations that help relocalize Jewish space. In this article, we argue that the task of reading Jewish identity as a diaspora community calls for a location and geography specific response, especially in aesthetic discourses that unfold Jewish identity situated outside the Eurocentric contexts. Such location-specific readings can enable a "provincializing" of the West-centr…
Feminist Literary Criticism Meets Feminist Theology: Yashodhara and the Rise of Hagiographical Fiction in Modern Feminist Re-visioning
Feminist re-visioning has led to heterogenous retellings of mythological heroines in fiction. Sita and Draupadi, two of the well-known Indian mythological characters, have been explored in various capacities in mythological fiction. Yashodhara, Buddha’s wife, is a recent addition to this re-visioning project. This article seeks to engage with three retellings of Yashodhara’s story—each of which is radically different from the others. The result i…
Kochi: Provincialising Postcolonial Metro-Cosmopolitan Spatialities
There is much to learn about how some locales come to be deemed as more cosmopolitan than others. Mumbai is hailed as a cosmopolitan city and even a model for India. With an increasing sense of disappointment about the decline of cosmopolitanism in such metropolitan cities, there is a need to look at what other locales can offer as alternative models of cosmopolitanism. This article addresses Kochi as a locale that is nuanced with precolonial pra…
Feminist Literary Criticism Meets Feminist Theology: Yashodhara and the Rise of Hagiographical Fiction in Modern Feminist Re-visioning
Feminist re-visioning has led to heterogenous retellings of mythological heroines in fiction. Sita and Draupadi, two of the well-known Indian mythological characters, have been explored in various capacities in mythological fiction. Yashodhara, Buddha’s wife, is a recent addition to this re-visioning project. This article seeks to engage with three retellings of Yashodhara’s story—each of which is radically different from the others. The result i…
Love as Enlightenment and Enlightenment as Love: Reading Feminist Hermeneutic of Reconstruction in Vanessa R Sasson’s Yasodhara and the Buddha
Exercises in feminist theology outside Western contexts and outside of discourses of theorisation can prove to be enriching to address the disconnection between secular and religious feminisms. One way to address this disconnection is to locate the intersection between secular and religious feminisms in the space of fiction. While mytho-fiction about the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, has been around for quite some time and has be…
Cochin in Sethu’s Aliyah: Provincializing Jewish identity
An interest in Jewish topographies involves looking at Jewish presence in locations that help relocalize Jewish space. In this article, we argue that the task of reading Jewish identity as a diaspora community calls for a location and geography specific response, especially in aesthetic discourses that unfold Jewish identity situated outside the Eurocentric contexts. Such location-specific readings can enable a "provincializing" of the West-centr…
“A Literature of Frustration and Failure”: The Anxiety of Indianness in the Making of Sindhi Literature as an Indian Literature
Studies of Partition frequently turn to literature to understand how displacement processes, among other things, impact aesthetics and representation. This article takes a broader view of aesthetics as representation: it demonstrates how turning to the literary archive of a moment and a community gives rise to questions about the politics of individual texts and literary historiography. Centered on Sindhi literature produced in India after Partit…
The Question of Script for Sindhi in India: Reflections on Postcolonial Grammatology
When Sindhi Hindus came to India after the 1947 Partition, they had little to help them survive as a community. Given the linguistic organization of states in independent India, the community has been striving to forge an identity comparable to other communities that have a state/territory they can flourish in. First, Sindhis struggled to gain recognition for their language as an official language listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution…
Provincializing Island Poetics: The Personal as the Spatial in N S Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery
Affect towards islands is a unique approach to engage with in discussions of the phenomenology of fictional islands. This affect complements the already identified tropes within island poetics: those of sensorial exploration, spatial practices, and textural detailing of islands. This article turns to a work of fiction about a fictional island based on the island city of Kochi in south India to unpack an alternative aesthetic of spatiality, the ki…
From the sthala purana to the novel: Sethu’s The Saga of Muziris as a narrative geography of the ancient Indian port city of Muziris
The narrative approach to city writing in the postcolonial world gravitates towards metropolitan spaces. The discourse around how these cities are imagined and theorized uses reference points from modernity. With the emergence of the spatial turn in literary theory and criticism, this discourse borrows from Western, postmodern sensibilities to define cities and their narrative possibilities. In contrast to these sensibilities, regional variations…
Kochi: Provincialising Postcolonial Metro-Cosmopolitan Spatialities
There is much to learn about how some locales come to be deemed as more cosmopolitan than others. Mumbai is hailed as a cosmopolitan city and even a model for India. With an increasing sense of disappointment about the decline of cosmopolitanism in such metropolitan cities, there is a need to look at what other locales can offer as alternative models of cosmopolitanism. This article addresses Kochi as a locale that is nuanced with precolonial pra…
The rise (in the fall) of Cochin: Provincializing metropolitan spatiality in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh
Indian fiction and critical engagements with it have a metropolitan bias. The preference for representations of big cities such as Mumbai in fiction means that non-metropolitan ("provincial") spaces in India face neglect, literary and otherwise. This article argues for provincializing Indian fiction by exploring non-metropolitan locations as imagined in works of fiction to unpack alternative spatialities. The example offered is Salman Rushdie's T…
Critical agendas for the areal linguistics: Locating Sindhi within South Asia
As a concept within applied linguistics, areal linguistics concerns itself with investigating the nature of structural similarities among languages produced by contact rather than by history or by genetic similarities. A critical look at its descriptive linguistic agendas reveals that the domain needs to be revisited in terms of questions of power relations and linguistic inequalities within specific linguistic areas. Such investigations reconfig…
Archiving frictions: Sindhi libraries and the struggle for belonging in India
Sociology (10 works) · Art (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · History (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Geography (4 works)