What Two Days at a National Seminar Did to How I Read Literature
A Note Before I Begin
I signed up to volunteer at this seminar because it was organised by our department and I wanted to help. I expected to spend two days coordinating logistics printing delegate lists, managing registration desks, keeping the projector from failing at critical moments. I did all of that.
What I did not expect was to come away with a sharper, more honest understanding of what I have actually been doing for the past three years in an English Literature programme in India and more specifically, what I have been not doing, without realising it.
The IKS and English Studies National Seminar-Workshop was held on 23–24 March 2026 at the Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU), supported by a grant from the Knowledge Consortium of Gujarat (KCG). The event brought together scholars from multiple universities to ask one focused question: how can Indian Knowledge Systems be integrated into the teaching, research, and curriculum design of English Studies in Indian universities not as decoration, not as a nationalist gesture, but as a rigorous, working intellectual framework?
I want to go through what was said, session by session, with some honesty about what hit me, what complicated my thinking, and what I think I will actually do differently because of those two days.
Day One, Session One — The Challenge Laid on the Table
Prof. Dushyant Nimavat: Why Indian Epistemology Is Not the Alternative — It Is the Starting Point
The auditorium was full on the morning of 23 March. There was the particular energy of a room that is not entirely sure what it is about to hear. The inaugural lamp was lit, the dignitaries were seated, and then Prof. Dushyant Nimavat from the Department of English at Gujarat University, Ahmedabad, opened the academic programme with a question that, honestly, no one in that room could comfortably deflect.
He asked why we Indian students and scholars of literature habitually reach for Eurocentric theoretical frameworks as our first and often only analytical tools. Not as one set of tools among many. As the tools. Structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxist criticism, post-structuralism, deconstruction: we know their vocabularies, their key thinkers, their canonical applications. Most of us can reference Lacan or Derrida faster than we can articulate what arthapatti means or how the Nyaya Sutras approach the question of valid inference.
Prof. Nimavat was not making a case against Western theory. That would be too easy and, frankly, not very interesting. His argument was more precise: that India has a set of epistemological frameworks developed over centuries the Nyaya school of logic, the Pramanas as systematic categories of valid knowledge, Bhartrhari's philosophy of language, the interpretive methodology of Mimamsa that are as rigorous, as technically demanding, and as analytically productive as anything produced by European philosophy. The problem is not that we read Foucault. The problem is that we read Foucault and never read the Vakyapadiya.
The practical demonstration was what made this concrete rather than merely idealistic. Prof. Nimavat showed how Rasa theory the aesthetic framework developed in Bharata Muni's Natyashastra and elaborated by Abhinavagupta in his commentary Abhinavabharati functions as a fully developed critical methodology. Rasa theory identifies eight (later nine) fundamental aesthetic emotions (rasas): Shringara (love), Hasya (humour), Karuna (grief), Raudra (fury), Vira (heroism), Bhayanaka (terror), Bibhatsa (disgust), Adbhuta (wonder), and Shanta (serenity). Each rasa is produced through specific emotional stimulants (vibhavas), reactions (anubhavas), and transitory feelings (vyabhicharibhavas).
When he applied this to a modern English text analysing how a novel's emotional architecture is constructed, which rasas it activates and in what sequence the analysis was not thin. It was not a cultural curiosity exercise. It had the same granularity that a psychoanalytic reading of the same text would have. The difference is that Rasa theory does not require the reader to accept a set of assumptions about the unconscious or about capitalist alienation before proceeding. It begins with the aesthetic transaction itself: what emotion does this text produce in the reader, through what means, and to what end?
— Prof. Dushyant Nimavat, Opening Plenary, 23 March 2026
I left this session with a specific problem I had not had before: I could not explain why I had spent three years learning to read through Western frameworks and never once been offered this. That is not blame. It is a structural observation about how English Studies is inherited in India. But it is a real observation, and it unsettled me.
Dr. Kalyani Vallath: The Ecology That Was Never Separated from the Self
Dr. Kalyani Vallath, CEO and Founder of Vallath Education in Thiruvananthapuram, followed Prof. Nimavat and took us into territory that felt, at first, very specific ancient Tamil literary aesthetics from the Sangam period and turned out to be one of the broadest arguments of the entire seminar.
Her subject was Tinai aesthetics, the classical framework articulated in the Tolkappiyam, one of the oldest surviving works of Tamil literary theory. The Tinai system divides the landscape into five ecological zones and assigns to each zone a corresponding emotional register, a corresponding set of plants, animals, seasons, times of day, and human activities. This is not metaphor in the Western Romantic sense the pathetic fallacy, the projection of human emotion onto a neutral nature. It is something structurally different: a theory in which human emotional life and the natural environment are understood to be the same kind of thing, operating according to the same principles.
The five Tinai landscapes are:
| Tinai Landscape | Season / Time | Emotional Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Kurinji (Mountains, cool forests) | Winter, midnight | Secret union of lovers; intensity of new love |
| Mullai (Forests, pastoral land) | Monsoon, evening | Patient waiting; constancy during separation |
| Marutam (Agricultural fields, rivers) | All seasons, dawn | Lovers' quarrels; infidelity; reconciliation |
| Neithal (Coastal regions, seashore) | All seasons, late afternoon | Anxious longing; waiting without certainty |
| Paalai (Desert, arid wasteland) | Summer, midday | Harsh separation; the journey away from home |
What Dr. Vallath argued drawing on Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology and Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism to show that Western scholarship had arrived at adjacent ideas through very different paths is that the Tinai system is a pre-modern theory of ecological consciousness. It anticipates by two millennia what contemporary ecocriticism has been trying to build: a way of reading the relationship between human interiority and the natural world as non-hierarchical, non-extractive, and structurally reciprocal.
The reason this mattered practically, for those of us reading English literature, is that ecocriticism as we inherit it in most curricula is dominated by British Romantic assumptions and twentieth-century American environmental movements. Both of those traditions begin from a premise of separation nature as something external to the human, something lost, something to be returned to. The Tinai system begins from the opposite premise: that the mountain landscape, the monsoon forest, and the shore at late afternoon are not backdrops to human emotion. They are the emotion, expressed in a different register.
Reading Keats's "To Autumn" through Tinai, for instance, is not a gimmick. The seasonal landscape in that poem is doing exactly what the Mullai zone does in classical Tamil poetry it is the emotional equivalent of waiting, of patient endurance at the end of something, of a constancy that does not protest its own impending conclusion. Western ecocriticism notices this but does not have the precise vocabulary for it. The Tinai system gives you the vocabulary.
— Dr. Kalyani Vallath, Plenary Session, 23 March 2026
Day One, Sessions Two and Three — Theory Under Examination
Paper Presentations: The Nerve It Takes to Stand Up and Argue
The afternoon of the first day moved into paper presentations, and this is where I paid the closest attention, because these were the moments where the theoretical frameworks introduced in the plenary talks had to survive contact with actual texts. That is always the test.
Bhumi Gohil presented Krishna as a trickster hero, drawing on comparative mythology and archetypal criticism while staying firmly within the Indian textual tradition. The argument was that the figure of the trickster the divine transgressor who breaks rules to restore a deeper order does not require Loki or Anansi as its archetype. Krishna's Lila (divine play), his theft of butter, his deception on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, his relationship with the gopis: all of this constitutes a fully articulated trickster mythology that predates and in many respects exceeds the Western comparative examples we usually reach for. What I found genuinely useful in this paper was the methodological implication: comparative mythology does not have to be comparative in the direction of West as reference point and East as example. The frame can be entirely indigenous, and the analytical depth does not diminish.
Asha Kurana's paper took a different angle entirely. Her argument was about timing: if the goal of decolonising education is to produce students who can think critically from within their own epistemological traditions, then beginning at the postgraduate level is far too late. By the time a student arrives in an MA programme, their reading habits, their sense of what constitutes a valid argument, their aesthetic assumptions all of these are already formed. She proposed introducing IKS concepts into school curricula at secondary level: not as cultural heritage content but as genuine analytical tools. Dharma as an ethical framework for reading moral dilemmas in literature. Basic Nyaya logic as an introduction to how arguments are structured and how knowledge claims are validated. Rasa aesthetics as a way of discussing why a poem produces the emotional response it does. I found myself both persuaded by this and uncertain about its practical feasibility given how school curricula work in practice. But the question she was asking at what age do we begin to form critical thinkers, and through whose framework? is not one you can dismiss.
Dr. Balaji Shel's paper offered the most formally unusual comparative argument of the session. He placed Lepcha oral traditions from the indigenous communities of Sikkim and the Himalayan foothills alongside Tinai poetics from the Tamil Sangam tradition and used neither Western theory nor a Western thinker as the bridge between them. The comparison worked through shared structural principles: both traditions map emotional meaning onto specific landscape features; both treat human experience as inseparable from ecological context; both use seasonal and environmental cues as the primary vocabulary for describing interior states. The methodological point was quiet but important: comparative literature does not need a Western mediator. Two non-Western traditions can speak to each other directly. The shared intellectual territory they find is comparative literature.
In Session 2, the papers pushed further into the comparative engagement between IKS and canonical Western texts.
Omi Joshi compared the "sense sublime" in Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey with the Advaita Vedanta concept of non-duality the realisation of the non-separation between Atman (individual self) and Brahman (universal consciousness). This is not a superficial parallel. Wordsworth's description of moments when the individual mind feels itself to be continuous with the force that runs through all things is philosophically close to the Upanishadic understanding that the boundary between individual and universal consciousness is a construction, not a fact. Reading Tintern Abbey through Advaita does not reduce the poem; it opens it.
Priti Taresha's comparison of Robinson Crusoe with the Bhagavad Gita on the question of divine intervention surprised the room, and it should have. On the surface, Defoe's Protestant merchant castaway and Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra have nothing in common. But Priti's paper argued that both texts are, at their structural core, narratives about a man alone separated from the social world confronting a crisis of action. In both cases, the divine provides the framework within which action becomes possible again. The paper was arguing that IKS offers interpretive categories for one of the most taught texts in the English canon that Western scholarship has not exhausted.
Shristi and Anandini's joint paper on flood memory and Tinai poetics connected the Neithal (coastal) landscape aesthetics to modern climate fiction, looking at how catastrophic water events are processed, mythologised, and narrativised in coastal literary traditions. An indigenous Indian poetics of the coastal landscape one that has been thinking about the relationship between water, land, and human survival for over two thousand years has something specific to contribute to that conversation.
Day Two, Morning — The Classroom We Have Not Built Yet
Dr. Kalyan Chattopadhyay: Teaching Differently Is Not Optional If You Are Teaching This
The second day opened with what was, for me, the most uncomfortable and necessary lecture of the entire seminar. Dr. Kalyan Chattopadhyay from Bankim Sardar College, University of Calcutta, spoke about pedagogy about how IKS should be taught, not just what should be taught and the discomfort his lecture generated was productive precisely because it was aimed at the entire room, including the faculty in it.
He began with Paulo Freire's concept of the "banking model" of education: the classroom as a one-directional transaction in which the teacher deposits approved knowledge into passive students, who receive, memorise, and reproduce it in examinations. Dr. Chattopadhyay's argument was straightforward and, once stated, obvious: you cannot use a colonial pedagogical structure to teach a decolonial intellectual tradition. The method and the content are not separable.
— Dr. Kalyan Chattopadhyay
His proposed alternative is the model of Samvada, which translates approximately as dialogue or debate but carries connotations that neither English word fully captures. Samvada in the Upanishadic tradition is genuinely open-ended. In the Kena Upanishad, in the Katha Upanishad, in the Chandogya Upanishad, the philosophical conversations are driven by the student's question, not the teacher's agenda. The entire philosophical content emerges from the student's refusal to accept evasion.
The Bhagavad Gita, which is the most read philosophical text in the Indian tradition, is structured the same way. It begins with Arjuna's breakdown and every line of Krishna's teaching is a response to the specific texture of that breakdown. The teaching is generated by the student's need, not delivered as a pre-formed curriculum.
Dr. Chattopadhyay then described specific pedagogical interventions: using primary texts in translation as direct reading material rather than only reading scholarship about those texts; designing assessment tasks that require students to apply IKS frameworks to new texts; creating classroom structures in which students debate the validity of different interpretive approaches. He discussed the concept of parishad (scholarly assembly or council) as a model for seminars and tutorials.
What struck me about this lecture was its practical implication for how I study, not just for how teachers should teach. If Samvada is the right model, then my own relationship with the texts I read should be dialogic I should be bringing my actual questions and confusions to them, not looking for ways to demonstrate that I have understood the approved interpretation.
Day Two, Afternoon — How the Current Also Ran the Other Way
Prof. Ashok Sachdeva: T.S. Eliot Borrowed From Us
Prof. Ashok Sachdeva delivered a lecture that overturned the most persistent assumption in the standard English Studies narrative: that intellectual and aesthetic influence between India and the West moved in one direction, from West to East, through colonisation.
T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land ends with lines drawn directly from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The thunder's command — Datta (give), Dayadhvam (sympathise), Damyata (control) and the poem's closing invocation of "Shantih shantih shantih" are not decorative Orientalism. They are the poem's emotional and spiritual resolution. When we teach The Waste Land without teaching the Upanishadic context, we are teaching an incomplete text.
W.B. Yeats's engagement with Indian philosophy was even deeper and more sustained. His absorption of Hindu cyclical time into his theory of history shaped the structure of his late poetry. Ralph Waldo Emerson's concept of the Over-Soul is Advaita Vedanta translated into nineteenth-century American prose. The American Transcendentalist movement was substantially built on ideas taken from the Upanishads.
— Prof. Ashok Sachdeva, Plenary Session, 24 March 2026
Prof. Atanu Bhattacharya: The Grammar That Predates Everything, and What Was Done to It
Prof. Atanu Bhattacharya took the longest historical view of the seminar. He began with Panini the grammarian of the fourth century BCE whose Ashtadhyayi is one of the most sophisticated formal descriptions of language ever produced by any civilisation. It is a generative grammar that anticipated Chomskyan linguistics by two and a half millennia.
Prof. Bhattacharya then moved to Bhartrhari and the Vakyapadiya, the fifth-century CE treatise on the philosophy of language. Bhartrhari's argument that shabda (word/language) is not merely a vehicle for thought but the medium in which thought exists is a position that Western philosophy only arrived at with Wittgenstein.
He then traced what happened to this tradition during the Fort William College era, when the British colonial administration stripped the philosophical traditions out of these languages. Panini's grammar became a historical curiosity rather than a living analytical tool.
— Prof. Atanu Bhattacharya, Plenary Session, 24 March 2026
Prof. Sachin Ketkar: Why the Word for Translation Already Contains the Argument
Prof. Sachin Ketkar gave the translation studies lecture, built around an etymological argument. The Sanskrit word for translation is Anuvad: anu (after, following) and vad (to speak, to say). To translate is to speak after to follow the original utterance and carry it forward into a new context. The word does not imply copying. It implies continuation.
This is structurally different from the dominant Western framework for translation, which has been organised around the concept of equivalence. Fidelity is the standard. Deviation is failure. The problem is that equivalence, when applied to translation between languages as fundamentally different in their conceptual structures as Sanskrit and English, is routinely impossible. There is no English equivalent for Dharma. Any translation of a text in which Dharma is doing philosophical work must make a choice, and every choice is a reduction.
The Anuvad framework says: you are not copying, you are speaking after. Something is carried. Something is transformed. We look for what is carried, what is transformed, what choices the translator made and why, and what the gaps tell us about the difference between the conceptual worlds the two languages inhabit.
— Prof. Sachin Ketkar, Plenary Session, 24 March 2026
Day Two, Final Session — The Vocabulary That Was Already There
Dr. Amrita Das: What Shakti Offers That Irigaray Had to Build
Dr. Amrita Das closed the academic programme with the lecture I have thought about most since the seminar ended. Her subject was the concept of the Divine Feminine in Indian intellectual and spiritual traditions, read through the theoretical framework of Luce Irigaray. Irigaray's argument is that Western philosophy has been structured around the male subject as the norm. Feminist thought, in Irigaray's framework, requires the construction of an entirely new symbolic vocabulary for the feminine.
Dr. Das's critical move was to note that this construction is already present in Indian philosophical and spiritual traditions, not as something that needs to be built but as something that needs to be reclaimed from the patriarchal distortions that have accumulated around it. Shakti is the concept at the centre of this argument. The Sanskrit formulation is precise and unequivocal: Shiva without Shakti is shava a corpse. The feminine principle is not supplementary to the cosmic order. It is its engine.
The figure of Prakriti (nature, the material world, creative energy) in Samkhya philosophy complements this. Prakriti is feminine, and it is the generative principle of the entire material universe. Dr. Das showed that the contemporary feminist project of finding a language for female power is not, in the Indian context, an exercise in invention. It is an exercise in archaeology: the vocabulary was there, it was suppressed, and it can be recovered.
— Dr. Amrita Das
The Valedictory: What a Certificate Actually Means
After Dr. Das's lecture, the auditorium changed temperature in the particular way it does at the end of an academic event that has gone well: the concentrated attention of two days softened into something more human. Certificates were distributed. Photographs were taken. There was a lot of applause.
As a volunteer standing near the back of the hall, I had a slightly different angle on the room than the delegates sitting in it. I could see my peers walking up to collect their presentation certificates, and the applause from our cohort was not polite. It was the kind of noise a room makes when it is genuinely pleased for someone, because it knows what standing in front of senior academics and making an argument feels like, and it is harder than it looks.
Organising a national seminar from the inside involves a kind of attention that is different from attending as a delegate. You are watching the event as a logistical system as well as an intellectual one. The valedictory was a recognition of all of that the academic work of the speakers and presenters, and the practical work of the organisers and volunteers. Both kinds of work are necessary for an event like this to be what it was.
What I Am Taking Out of Those Two Days: A Practical Account
I want to be specific here, because vague takeaways are easy to write and useless to read. These are not inspirational conclusions. They are the actual changes in how I am going to read and work.
- ✦ On methodology: The most immediate practical change is that I now have two Indian epistemological frameworks I can use as primary analytical tools rather than as optional additions. Rasa theory gives me a vocabulary for the aesthetic transaction... The Nyaya framework gives me a way to think about how different kinds of literary evidence work. Both of these are working tools. I intend to use them.
- ✦ On reading Western modernism: The three writers Prof. Sachdeva discussed Eliot, Yeats, Emerson are all writers I have studied and will study further. I cannot now read The Waste Land without the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad open alongside it. This is not an addition to the reading. It is a completion of it.
- ✦ On translation: Every translation of an Indian text I read from here forward, I will read as Anuvad as a speaking-after, not a copy. I will pay attention to what choices the translator made, what the gaps are, and what those gaps tell me about the conceptual distance between the languages involved.
- ✦ On ecology: I study and write about nature in literature. The Tinai framework has given me an analytical precision I did not have before. The specific claim that in classical Tamil poetics, the distinction between interior emotional life and exterior natural environment is not a distinction at all but a difference in register within a single system is a position I can now apply, argue for, and test against specific texts.
- ✦ On feminist criticism in the Indian context: I was already reading some feminist criticism. I was reading almost none of it through the Shakta tradition, through Prakriti, through the history of female mystics in India. That is a gap I intend to close, beginning with the texts Dr. Das mentioned.
- ✦ On how I learn: Dr. Chattopadhyay's lecture about Samvada changed something in how I think about my own responsibility as a student. If the seminars and tutorials I attend are going to be anything other than banking-model transactions, I have to bring genuine questions to them not polished demonstrations of having understood the material, but the actual difficulties, the actual points of disagreement. In the Samvada model, that is the starting point.
A Final Note
The seminar is over. My notebook from those two days is almost completely full. The ideas in it will take time to work through properly some of them I will not fully understand until I try to apply them and discover where they break down or need qualifying.
What I am certain of is this: I came into that auditorium as a student who had learned to read English literature through frameworks that were, almost entirely, produced outside the intellectual tradition I live inside. I came out with the beginning of a different reading practice one that is not anti-Western, not nostalgic, not nationalist, but genuinely comparative in the sense that the seminar's organisers intended: treating Indian Knowledge Systems and English Studies as equal participants in a global intellectual conversation rather than as host and visitor.
The harder work is what happens next. The dissertation. The classroom. The reading I do quietly, alone, after the seminar has ended and no one is watching whether I actually use what I was given. That is where it either becomes real or it doesn't.
I am grateful to MKBU, to every speaker who took those two days seriously, and to every peer who stood up and made an argument in front of people who knew more than they did. That nerve is not nothing.
📺 Full Seminar Recordings:
- Inauguration & Plenary Day 1 — Nimavat & Vallath
- Paper Presentation Session 1
- Paper Presentation Session 2
- Plenary — Dr. Kalyan Chattopadhyay
- Plenary Day 2 — Sachdeva, Bhattacharya, Ketkar
- Dr. Amrita Das & Valedictory
This blog reflects on the IKS and English Studies National Seminar-Workshop held at the Department of English, MKBU. A two-day journey from Eurocentric literary methodology towards the rich, integrated world of Indian Knowledge Systems exploring Rasa, Tinai, Samvada, Anuvad, and Shakti as living critical tools for the contemporary student of literature.
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