Contributors

Aatika Singh is a Delhi based artist, activist and scholar. She is currently pursuing a PhD from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research is on the philosophical and political connections of aesthetics in the subcontinent with respect to Dalit cultural history and assertion. She has been published with The Hindu, The Wire, Cafe Dissensus, Trolley Times, Indian Cultural Forum, among others. She is passionate about emotional labour, alternative cinema, resistance visuality and rural activism traditions.

Abhilash Jayachandra is a freelance professional from India. He writes about food and literature and edits books for a few indie publishers. He is currently working on his first novel. His short stories have been published in Cast of Wonders, Hakara Journal, Prachya Review, and Strange Horizons.

Achita Khare was born and brought up in North India, she truly grew up in Bangalore. The city she loves for dosa, coffee, and what it made her in that order. She processes numbers by the day (Marketer by profession), and words by the night. While trying to make sense of each, sometimes she fails at both. At others emerge a poem or a prose. She finds my inspiration in people, Kolatkar, Tagore, Maggie Smith, Krishna Sobti. She has been previously published in Gulmohur Quarterly and Verses of Silence.

Ambika Aiyadurai is an anthropologist of wildlife conservation with a special interest in human-animal relations and community-based conservation projects in Arunachal Pradesh, India. Ambika is an Assistant Professor (Anthropology) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar.

Anand Pratap has a BFA and an MFA degree, specialized in creative paintings and portrait, from prestigious art school Sir J.J School of Art-Mumbai. He is known as an artist with philosophical vision and hand. His artworks widely cover the concepts of Buddhism and Philosophy, Tribal Culture in Central India and the same in the Maharashtra region. He is the recipient of prestigious awards, including the National Award by The Art Society of India, 51st Maharashtra State Art Award 2018-19, State Level Portrait Competition 2015-16-First Prize, Lokmanya Tilak and Late BARR. V.V OAK Smriti All India Art Exhibition Award 2017 etc. He is currently occupied as an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Art and Design, Vishwakarma University, Pune.

Amulya B is a Bengaluru-based writer, translator and multimedia journalist. She works in both Kannada and English. She is the winner of Toto Funds the Arts (TFA) award for English and Kannada Creative Writing (2021).

Anubhuti Sharma is an independent researcher and musician from Delhi. She completed her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2018. Her research focuses on the music of Kumar Gandharva and interrogates the idea of knowledge and freedom in Hindustani music in the twentieth century.

Ashutosh Potdar is a playwright, poet, short-story writer, translator and scholar. He writes in Marathi and English. 

Bhaskar Hande is an accomplished artist working in sculpture, painting and other visual mediums. He also writes poetry and on language, sant literature and history. Based in the Netherlands for forty years, Hande has specially studied Sant Tukaram Maharaj’s poetry and presented them in visual forms through his project Tujhe Roop Maajhe Dene Me’. The project has been exhibited for scholars and enthusiasts at Global Art Environment, Aundh (Pune).

Carol D’Souza lives in Chennai. 

Dr. Rashmi Dubey is an Assistant Professor of English at Govt. D.B. Girls’ P.G. College, Raipur, Chhattisgarh. 

Dr. Sanjay Borude is a writer, poet, translator and historian. He has published collections of poems, short-stories, translations, reviews and books on history. He is the recipient of Bhausaheb Shingade Award (Wardha), Padmashri Vitthalrao Vikhe Patil Award (Pravaranagar), N.G. Deshpande (Mehekar) Award and other awards. His collection of English poetry is jointly published by Penguin and Random House.

Dr. Shaktipada Kumar teaches at the Department of English, Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University, India. His Ph.D. thesis focused on the Chhou Dance Tradition of Purulia. Dr. Kumar is a Folk Singer and Director of a Chhou Dance Troupe in Purulia. His area of research interest includes Performance Studies, Mnemocultures, Oral Traditions, Cultural Studies.

Dr. Surama Bera , teaches at the department of Communicative English, Asutosh College, Kolkata. She has received Ph.D. in English from Sidho-Kanho-Birsa University, West Bengal. Her Ph.D. thesis focused on the folk songs of Purulia. Her area of research interest includes Performance Narratives, Folklore Studies, Cultural Studies.

Isha Banerjee is a research scholar of English literature at Pt. Ravishankar Shukla University, Raipur, Chhattisgarh. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the aspects of cultural diversity in select Caribbean novels. She aspires to create impactful literary works, hoping to live up to the self-claimed sobriquet of “worder”.

Jerin Anne Jacob is pursuing her PhD at TISS, Mumbai and researches and writes on contemporary retellings of biblical narratives in India. An educator of Language and Literature, she thrives on her ardour for teaching to foster radical thinking among young minds. A firm believer in writing based and art driven activism, she uses poetry and storytelling as a means to propagate social change. 

Kevin Martens Wong is the gay, non-binary leader of the Kristang/Portuguese-Eurasian community in Singapore, and an independent scholar and researcher who goes by the titles the “Last Merlionsman” and “First Dreamtiger” of the Republic of Singapore. His scholarly work can be found at merlionsman.com, and his creative writing at tigrisachang.substack.com.

Laya Kumar taught theatre at a Waldorf school in her hometown, Coimbatore and is currently exploring different forms of theatre. 

Mamata Pandya has been an environmental educator for over three decades. She is also an instructional design consultant, writer, storyteller, and blogger based in Ahmedabad.

Nimisha Chandel was born on 31st August,1998 in Bhopal, later raised in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. She joined Visva Bharati University, West Bengal in 2017, to pursue a BFA in Painting and is currently graduating with an MFA in Painting from the same. Over the years, she has developed her art practice to revisit and question ideal formats of experiencing basic evolutionary emotions of loss, love, anger, solace and so on. 

Pratiksha Khasnis is a theatre actor, director, and trainer based in Maharashtra. She has been studying and exploring her own methods and styles of acting focusing on body and voice. 

Priyesh Gothwal is a visual artist based in Delhi. He completed his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida in 2017. Working with mediums such as drawing, text, video and photography, his inquiries are centered on the formation of language, fiction, and various narrative configurations. He was a resident artist at the Ashkal Alwan – Home Workspace program, Lebanon from 2019 to 2020 and has also exhibited in group shows and open studios since 2017. Presently, he is working as a program manager of the BFA program at OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat. He is also a founding member of a collective art initiative called firstdraft.

Raghvendra Vanjari is a birder. His attraction towards the natural world made him pursue his masters in Zoology. Nature writing consumes much of his time when he is out of the office. Cycling and painting connects him towards his habitat. 

Sahej Rahal is primarily a storyteller. He weaves together fact and fiction, to create counter-mythologies that interrogate narratives shaping the present. His myth-world takes the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, and AI programs. Rahal’s participation in group and solo exhibitions includes the Gwangju Biennale, the Liverpool Biennial, the Kochi Biennale, and the Vancouver Biennale among others. He is the recipient of the Cove Park/Henry Moore Fellowship, Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation Installation Art Grant, the Digital Earth Fellowship, and the first Human-Machine Fellowship organized by Junge Akademie ADK.

Samiksha has a BFA and MFA in art from Visva Bharati University. In 2017, she received a scholarship from the Government of China to travel to China and study Chinese. In 2018, she was awarded the Krishnakriti Fellowship to pursue a diploma in art and design in France. 

Shilpa Gupta was born and lives in Mumbai. She studied at the Sir J. J. School of Fine Arts in the 1990s. Through research-based practice, she has engaged with art in its participatory, interactive, and public dimensions over two decades. She incorporates a range of diverse material such as text, drawings, objects, sound, and interactive video to probe the ideas of borderlines, labels, censorship and security. Her works have been exhibited through biennales, museums, and galleries across the world. 

Shriram Sitaram Mohite lives in Kolhapur. A researcher of literature, Shriram has written poems, articles and columns on film and media for daily newspapers and web portals. He teaches Marathi on clock-hour-basis at Night College, Kolhapur.

Tina Marie Monelyon researches and lectures on entrepreneurship and innovation at Vienna University of Economics and Business while pursuing her PhD. Tina holds an MSc in management (University of Mannheim) and has completed PG Diplomas in modern and contemporary art history (Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum) and critical theory, aesthetics, and practice (Jnanapravaha, Mumbai). 

Tony Xavier is an engineer and a business management graduate by education, eschewed both for a career in test-preparation. He is currently the Chief Learning Officer of a test-prep firm and is based out of Mumbai. Primarily a reader, Tony found his calling as a poet in the year 2010 and has performed at spoken-word events in the city. 

Uma Shirodkar is a literary translator based in Mumbai, India. She was a 2022 South Asia Speaks Translation Fellow and runs Lyrically Obscure, an Instagram page dedicated to her multiple interests of literary translation, music, cinema, languages and literature. 

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Editor: Ashutosh Potdar

Guest Editor: Purvi Rajpuria

Editorial Support: Aishwarya Walvekar, Sharika Parmar.

Proofreading and copyediting: Ruta Manohar Bawadekar, Yvonne Vaz, Asmita Choudhury, Manasi Marathe, Prajakta Karandikar, Vanshika Sareen, Diya Shah, Indu MG, Poonam Chhatre.

Courtesy for images: Mayur Salgar

Courtesy for slider images: Pratiksha Khasnis, Shilpa Gupta, Samiksha

Courtesy for Section images: Anudev Manoharan, Samiksha, Pratiksha Khasnis, Shilpa Gupta, Anand Pratap, Nimisha Chandel