News & Updates | Department of Literature and Languages

Dr Partha Battacharjee, Assistant Professor from the Department of Literature and Languages, and his PhD scholar Mr Rounak Gupta have published a research article titled “Traversing through Transmedia: Dynamism of Augmented Reality Comics and Gender-based Violence in Ram Devineni’s Priya Series” in the Q1 journal, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.

The paper points out how augmented reality can enhance the reading and receptive experience of comics that can address, teach, and educate people on complex social problems like gender-based violence.

Abstract

This article looks at how Ram Devineni’s comic series—Priya’s Shakti, Priya’s Mirror, and Priya and the Lost Girls—use augmented reality and Hindu mythology to raise awareness about gender-based violence in India. It shows how these comics break traditional storytelling methods to engage readers on serious issues like rape, acid attacks, and trafficking.

Practical Implementation/ Social Implications of the Research

It is an analytical research that helps understand how basic building blocks towards gender sensitisation can be developed using comics and augmented reality technology to ‘educate’ people in a much more immersive and interesting way.

The team will continue to develop a theoretical foundation for addressing transmedia approaches in comics and other seemingly static art forms.

Collaboration

Dr Priyanka Tripathi, Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Patna

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Very often, it is assumed that the “vernacular” language texts in India do not undergo any anxiety of proving themselves Indian while works written in English do. In her research paper, “A Literature of Frustration and Failure”: The Anxiety of Indianness in the Making of Sindhi Literature as an Indian Literature”, published in the esteemed Q2 journal Journal of Sindhi Studies, Dr Soni Wadhwa, Assistant Professor, Department of Literature and Languages, focuses on Sindhi post literary activity that unfolded in the first 20 years after independence to show that Sindhi has a history of going through anxiety of belonging in India.

Abstract

Studies of Partition frequently turn to literature to understand how displacement processes, among other things, impact aesthetics and representation. The 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. Centred on Sindhi literature produced in India after Partition, it shows that examining the literary productivity of the community needs to involve questions of literature as political survival. It focuses on the earliest essays from the Sindhi literary scene in India (published in the Sahitya Akademi journal Indian Literature). The article argues that these essays register anxiety about the survival of a language trying to come into being in an already existing and complicated language-nation relationship. It unpacks three registers of anxiety visible in the literary archive to broaden the scope of the conversations around the Sindhi language and its literature.

This research has been conducted to advance interest in and conversations around Sindhi literature in India. Since Sindhi does not have a state in India, most people are not aware that it exists as a language and that it has a rich literary tradition.

After this article, Dr Soni Wadhwa intends to explore different writers, themes, and movements in Sindhi literature.

Collaborations

The research has been funded by George Mason University.

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