Dr Bharti Arora

Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow
Dr Bharti Arora

Dr Bharti Arora - orcid.org/0000-0003-2753-489X

Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow, January - April 2022

Home Institution: Tagore Government Arts and Science College, Pondicherry

Bharti Arora teaches at the Department of English, Tagore Government Arts and Science College, Pondicherry University. She earned her PhD (English) from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her areas of research include Gender Studies, Women’s Fiction, Indian Literatures, Social Movements and Nation. Her articles have appeared in journals like Indian Journal of Gender Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, South Asian Review, and Society and Culture in South Asia.  She is the author of Writing Gender, Writing Nation: Women’s Fiction in Post-independence India (Routledge 2019). 

Project Title: Making Resistances, Performing Decoloniality: Peasants’ Negotiations of State in Select Hindi Fiction of Post-independence India

Dr Arora explores how Hindi village fiction, produced in the revolutionary decades of the 1960s-70s, maps the complex character(s) of peasant movements in India. These narratives have hitherto been analysed only through the perspectives of Gandhian nationalism, regionalism (anchalikta) or disenchantment (mohbhang) vis-à-vis the Nehruvian regime or Extremism. The project, instead, problematises these perspectives on village life and peasants’ agitations by probing their everyday negotiations, exclusions and claims for land rights and equality (caste-gender-economic) vis-à-vis the institutional structures of the state from the perspective of decoloniality. By doing so, it discursively re-constructs the state as a symbolic and cultural terrain of meaning-making endeavours.