T171.
Indian Writers Challenge State Violence
Thursday, February 8, 2024
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
In the popular depictions of India circulating in the United States, we rarely see the stories that the nation’s jingoistic governments have shoved under the carpet, stories of massive human rights violations committed by the Indian state in the country’s margins: military violence and Hindu fundamentalist oppression—nearly absent in the vast array of widely read work about India available in English in the U.S. The panelists will discuss how they represent this in their work and the challenges associated.
Participants
Aruni Kashyap writes in Assamese and English. He is the author of two books of fiction, including His Father’s Disease (Gaudy Boy Books NY), and a poetry collection. Winner of fellowships from NEA and the Charles Wallace Trust, he is the director of the CWP at the University of Georgia, Athens.
Suchitra Vijayan is a New York-based author of the critically acclaimed Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India (2021) and How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (2023). She is a lawyer, researcher, and teaches at NYU Gallatin and Columbia University.
Shastri Akella's debut novel is The Sea Elephants (Flatiron (US-Canada), Penguin (India)). His writing has appeared in Guernica, Fairy Tale Review, Masters Review, The Rumpus, World Literature Today, CRAFT, etc. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Michigan State University.
Torsa Ghosal is the author of an experimental novella, Open Couplets, and a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind. Her work has appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Catapult, Lit Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is a professor of English at California State University and is at work on a novel.
