Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH) is a premier institute of science and technology established in 2008. IITH has been consistently ranked in the&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/reports/" rel="noopener noreferrer">top 10 institutes</a>&nbsp;in India for Engineering&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nirfindia.org/2021/EngineeringRanking.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">according to NIRF</a>&nbsp;making it one of the most coveted schools for science and technology in the country.

IITH offers&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/under-graduate/">undergraduate programs</a>&nbsp;in all the classical engineering disciplines, applied sciences, design, as well as several modern interdisciplinary areas. Students are given a flexibility to explore a broad set of areas, and potentially pursue a minor or double major in a discipline that is not their own. Students who wish to seek a deeper understanding of their own discipline are strongly encouraged to get involved in cutting-edge research with the help of a faculty to mentor them, and earn an Honors in their own field.

The very foundation of IIT Hyderabad is based on&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/research/">research and innovation</a>. The vibrant research culture is evident from the number of patents and publications that IITH produces consistently every year. IITH offers&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/programmes-offered/">graduate programs</a>&nbsp;at both a masters, and a doctoral level, in several diverse areas. There are separate programs for technology, design, science, and liberal arts. The&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/post-graduate/">MTech program</a>&nbsp;is offered in various modes and durations to cater to the ever-growing need of postgraduate level professionals in the country.

IITH encourages and supports&nbsp;<a href="https://iic-iith.netlify.app/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">innovation and entrepreneurship</a>&nbsp;at every stage. The minor program in entrepreneurship is open to all students of IITH, and many of the courses are offered by industrialists who are entrepreneurs themselves. There are various&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/research/centres-incubators/">innovation centers and incubators</a>&nbsp;that promote entrepreneurship and help mentor young innovators. IITH has been very successful in building tie-ups with leading academic institutions around the globe.

IITH enjoys a very special relationship with Japanese universities and industries that goes beyond academic and research collaborations. In fact, some of the iconic buildings in IITH campus will carry the signature of Japanese architecture.

IITH creates a unique holistic ecosystem for education that offers interactive learning, a very flexible academic structure, cutting-edge research, strong industry collaboration, and entrepreneurship. This is an environment which enables students and faculty to translate their dreams into realities.

IIT Hyderabad

In this chapter, I study Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016), Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (2020), and Bombay Begums (2021), to understand how her cultural productions explode the politics behind the scopophilic representation of female sexual desire by invoking certain widely marketed and frequently censored genres of erotic expression (erotic novels and app-based telephone sex) and then exposing their disturbing social underbelly where sexual violence resides. Shrivastava’s agentive female characters rupture these commercialized pulp sexual narratives and the fetishized figures of their heroines, replacing them with a far more problematic female voice of desire that speaks the truth about acquaintance sexual violence-a form of violence (marital rape, intimate partner sexual violence, sexual harassment, or intrafamilial sexual abuse) that is birthed by our misogynistic sexual culture and ignored by our legal structures. With reference to sociological and legal scholarship, I discuss how these works portray the distressing and unlegislated reality of acquaintance sexual violence-revealing the complex nature of sexual consent (which can be partial, subjective, and temporary), the varieties of nonconsensual sex (which can be unwanted/unwelcome even when not forced, and psychologically coercive even when not physically imposed), and the grimmer impact of acquaintance assault as compared to stranger rapes (Drakulich, Sociol Forum 30(1): 103-126, 2015). I will argue that this mordant critique is lodged in the new Indian Indie current-which, as critics have noted, spells the demise of the archvillain and transformation of the familiar ‘heroine’-and that it consequently stages socio-political intervention by demolishing the stereotypical ‘romantic hero’ and subversively projecting in his place the figures of the sexually desirous woman and the acquaintance rapist. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.

Department of Liberal Arts

Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema: Looking through their Gaze

“Rosy Ki Khwaheeshein”: Scripted Romance and Acquaintance Rape in Alankrita Shrivastava’s Oeuvre of Female Desire

A B S T R A C T: In depicting the fraught journey of a woman stand-up comedian in the late 1950s and 1960s, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel portrays stand-up as an ethical medium of truth telling and of sociopolitical protest that challenges systemic hierarchies of gender and sexuality. In this article, I show that stand-up’s foundational subversion is in its professionalism and in its departure from other forms of art. In the show, female stand-up comic Midge Maisel learns to function first as a seasoned professional and then as an ethical crusader who ultimately mounts a two-pronged attack on the sexist underpinnings of American humor and the patriarchal structure of stand-up, substantially influencing the way we receive this liminal genre of cultural expression and reframing it as an empowering vehicle of the marginalized. Copyright © 2023 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

Studies in American Humor

“A Punch Back, . . . a Contagious Guffaw” Feminist Humor in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and the Professionalization of the Rebellious Laugh

This essay focuses on three films from Gurinder Chadha’s South-Asian diasporic oeuvre, Rich Deceiver (1995), It’s A Wonderful Afterlife (2010), and the documentary titled What Do You Call An Indian Woman Who’s Funny? (1994), in order to understand the brand of humour that is theorized and staged from the filmmaker’s diasporic context of hybridity and liminality. I will argue that the female characters in the first two films produce dark humour from a position of marginality–-gendered and class-based in the case of Ellie Freeman (Rich Deceiver), gendered and racialized (diasporic) in the case of Mrs. Sethi (It’s A Wonderful Afterlife)–which in turn allows these characters agency and control in a public space where humour is generally assumed to be the exclusive preserve of masculine authority. I will argue that the very figure of a woman performing/producing dark humour–especially in a racially-inflected diasporic context such as Chadha’s own–functions as a vehicle for the critique of normative social oppression, whether gender-, class-, or race-based, and therefore becomes an inherently empowering template and expository medium both for the female characters and for the genre of South Asian diasporic cinema. © 2022 The British Association for South Asian Studies.

South Asian Studies

Dark Humour and the Female Performance of Subversion in South-Asian Diasporic Cinema: Chadha’s Rich Deceiver, It’s A Wonderful Afterlife, and What Do You Call An Indian Woman Who’s Funny?

I examine how recent historic incidents surrounding sexual violence that registered emotional shockwaves across India have been portrayed in Indian web series through a focus on police brutality and consequent experiences of pain. I study Delhi Crime (Directed by Richie Mehta, performance by Shefali Shah, Rasika Dugal and Adil Hussain. Netflix, 2019), a Netflix Original on the 2012 Nirbhaya Rape Case and Made in Heaven (Directed by Prashant Nair; written by Alankrita Shrivastava, Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, performance by Arjun Mathur, Sobhita Dhulipala and Vinay Pathak. Amazon Prime, 2019), a Prime Video Original about horrific systemic injustices against the queer community that culminated through turbulent protests into the long-awaited 2018 Supreme Court verdict. I study the way police torture inflicts pain on the human body, referring to the complex analyses of pain in Wittgenstein, Rachel Ablow, Elaine Scarry, Veena Das and David Morris, veering between understanding pain as something intensely bodily that obliterates the social and seeing pain as something that indubitably acquires meaning only in the social context within which it is inflicted and received. Drawing on both approaches, I will explore the political meaning of violent pain, arguing that these bodily experiences occupy a space between emotionality (in which the individual is reduced to nothing more than the reality of the pain) and morality (in which political forces and social hierarchies filter into its meaning) and together they confuse the very possibility of democratic surveillance and guardianship. Drawing on Ablow, I will study how socio-cultural meanings of pain derive historically from assumptions of shared sympathy. I will then unpack how the contemporary democratic state in these web series renders communitarian sympathy redundant, problematizing the very idea of pain as a shared emotion that can trigger moral responses. © The Author(s) 2021.

The Politics of Emotional Shockwaves

Shockwaves of rape and shattering of power in the contemporary Indian web series: The case of Delhi Crime, Made in Heaven and Judgement Day

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

“Not a muscle at my command”: Mesmeric Trance, Consent, and #MeToo in Richard Marsh

This chapter examines Richard Marsh’s treatment of the animalistic in his Imperial Gothic works, The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), The Goddess: A Demon (1900), and The Joss: A Reversion (1901). I show how, in each of these novels, the appearance of a colonial idol on the British landscape sets up a transgressive space between the colonial and the animalistic, and then connects it to the figure of the gender-subversive Victorian New Woman. Threading together these socially marginalised figures of the racial-, gender-, and animalistic-other, the novels strategically provide for an implicit questioning of the sociopolitical hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality. I demonstrate how it is in the overlap of the fears of the colonial animal and the fears surrounding the woman, more specifically the iconically rebellious New Woman, that the threat of the animal becomes most intense, viscerally challenging the hierarchies of white middle-class patriarchy often through a near-erotic proximity of the New Woman and the colonial animal. © 2020, The Author(s).

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

The Colonial Idol, the Animalistic, and the New Woman in the Imperial Gothic of Richard Marsh

The essay examines the way F. Anstey s A Fallen Idol (1886) and Richard Marsh s The Mahatma s Pupil (1893) dramatise the relationship between a Tibetan Theosophical mahatma and a western disciple through the use of cartographic imagery that ultimately subverts colonial hierarchies and exposes western religious anxieties. The novels are characterised by a "cartography of the supernatural" that derives from nineteenth-century scientific and occult ideas of spatiality, that is, both from new fin-de-siècle communication technologies connecting the mainland with colonies, and from the contemporary radical theorisation of occult communication between the east and the west. I argue that the novels effect a radical socio-political restructuration by building on this underlying cartographic imaginary to achieve subversive spatial re-mappings for a western audience. A crucial aspect of this narrative manoeuvre can be seen in the way the novels establish a parallel between the disciple s spatial bafflement surrounding the geographical remoteness of Theosophy and the western failure at grasping the spiritual depths of this colonial faith. The novels therefore ultimately offer a commentary on the desiccated state of western religiosity and the alternative templates of the miraculous offered by the colonial occult. © 2019 Victorian Popular Fiction Association. All Rights Reserved.