Tejaswini Niranjana


Tejaswini Niranjana is an Indian professor, cultural theorist, translator and author. She is best known for her contribution to the fields of culture studies, gender studies, translation, and ethnomusicology. She is the daughter of Kannada playwright and novelist Niranjana and writer Anupama Niranjana. Her partner is Indian author and cultural theorist, Ashish Rajadhyaksha.
In 2021, Tejaswini Niranjana was awarded the American Literary Translators Association Prize for Prose Fiction Translation for No Presents Please, a translation of author Jayant Kaikini's short stories centred around the city of Mumbai. In 2019, No Presents Please was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2018, which Niranjana shared jointly with Jayant Kaikini.
She is the recipient of the 2018 Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship, Research Grants Council, Hong Kong. Niranjana was also awarded the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award for Best Translation of 1994.
Niranjana is best known for her theory of the relationship between colonialism and translation, writings on feminism and the 'culture question' in India, and her practice-based research into music.
Niranjana has an M.A. in English and Aesthetics from the University of Bombay, an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Pune, and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Niranjana was the co-founder and a senior fellow at the, Bangalore, where she was also Lead Researcher in the Program. Currently, Niranjana serves as the director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research; and as Dean of Online Programmes, Ahmedabad University.
WWW ln.edu.hk/cultural/people...

Life and work

Born in Dharwad, India to the Kannada playwright and novelist Niranjana and writer Anupama Niranjana, Niranjana moved to Bangalore, India at the age of 2. She completed her schooling in Bangalore at The Home School ; Mahila Seva Samaja, attended pre-University at the National College, Jayanagar, and an undergraduate degree from the National College, Basavangudi, Bangalore.
Later, she completed an M.A. in English and Aesthetics from the University of Bombay, an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Pune, and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Since 2021, Niranjana serves as the director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research; and as Dean of Online Programmes, Ahmedabad University.
Niranjana was the co-founder and a senior fellow at the, Bangalore, where she was also Lead Researcher in the Program. She was the chair at the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai from 2012 till 2016.
From 2016 to 2021, she was a professor and head of the Department of Cultural Studies, at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and visiting professor with the School of Arts and Science at Ahmedabad University. She was the chair of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society.
She is the conceptualiser and co-producer of Jahaji Music, a documentary, starring Indian-Portuguese musician Remo Fernandes, that looks at musical forms in the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean. The film's title translates to "Ship's Music" which is a reference to the ships that carried indentured labour settlers from East India to French-Trinidad in the mid 19th century. The film, co-produced by filmmaker Surabhi Sharma, connected the worlds of gender, music and migration and was well received by the media.
She is also the author of, which examines the cultural, political and geographical reasons why Mumbai became such a popular centre for Hindustani music. In a 2014 interview with Online Indian Women's magazine The Ladies Finger, she detailed her research process for this project, which she describes as part ethnographic, part archival work and several interviews. As part of the same project, she once again collaborated with filmmaker Surabhi Sharma to produce the film Phir Se Sam Pe Aana.
She was a distinguished fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore from 2013 till 2016. She is also the recipient of the Sephis Postdoctoral Fellowship, Sawyer Fellow at the University of Michigan; Rockefeller Fellow, University of Chicago, and the Homi Bhabha National Fellowship. She was awarded the Central Sahitya Akademi Award for Best Translation Into English, and the Karnataka State Sahitya Akademi Award for Best Translation.
She has lecturedin the West Indies, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, Taiwan, the U.S, and the U.K. She learned music for a decade from Mumbai-based Gwalior gharana singer Neela Bhagwat.
Teju is also known in academic circles for her keen efforts in creating a bi-lingual pedagogy manual for classrooms in Indian Higher Education classrooms. Initial research toward this was carried out with fellow feminist scholar Sharmila Rege.
In 2009, she was part of a 180 strong list of Indian Academics who opposed Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, on the grounds that it was anti-democratic.

Publications

Books

  • Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious Mobilizing India: Women, Migration and Music between India and Trinidad
  • ''Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context''

Edited volumes

Music, Modernity, and Publicness in India.Breaking the Silo: Integrating Science Education in India - With K.Sridhar and Anup Dhar,.Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies - With Wang Xiaoming.Streevaadi Vimarshe - With Seemanthini Niranjana, in Kannada .Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India - With P. Sudhir and Vivek Dhareshwar,.

Selected articles in books

  • "Colonialism and the Politics of Translation", in An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, ed. Alfred Arteaga.
  • "Colonialism and the Aesthetics of Translation", in Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India, Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir and Vivek Dhareshwar.
  • "Translation, Colonialism, and the Rise of English", in Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History, ed. Svati Joshi.
  • "Indian nationalism and Female Sexuality: A Trinidadian Tale", in Sex and the citizen: interrogating the Caribbean, ed. Faith Smith.
  • "Hindi Cinema and Popular Music in Trinidad", in Remembered Rhythms, Shubha Chaudhuri and Anthony Seeger.
  • "Gender and the Media: Problems for Cultural History", in Re-Figuring Culture: History, Theory and the Aesthetic in Contemporary India ed. Satish Poduval.
  • "Vigilantism and the Pleasures of Masquerade: The Female Spectators of Vijayasanthi Films", in City Flicks, ed. Preben Kaarsholm.
  • "Nationalism Refigured: Contemporary South Indian Cinema and the Subject of Feminism", in Community, Gender and Violence: Subaltern Studies XI, Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan.
  • , "Kaadalan and the Politics of Resignification", in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed. Ravi Vasudevan.

Selected articles in journals

  • "English Education in the Multi-lingual Classroom", ' 16:2
  • "Culture, Feminism, Globalization", Introduction to Special Issue-Women's Studies, Economic and Political Weekly 50:17, 25 April.
  • "Music in the Balance: Language, Modernity and Hindustani Sangeet in Dharwad", Economic and Political Weekly XLVIII: 2,, 41–48.
  • "Why Culture Matters: Rethinking the Language of Feminist Politics", ' 11:2, 229–235.
  • "Transported by Song: Music and Cultural Labour in Dharwad", Sangeet Natak XLIII:2, 35–44.
  • "Teaching Gender Studies as Cultural Studies", ' 9:3, 469 – 477.
  • "Feminism and Cultural Studies in Asia", ' 9:2, 209–18.

Awards