Dr. Rajitha Venugopal

Rajitha Venugopal received her doctoral degree in English literature from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her dissertation was a study of the works of Barbara Kingsolver, a contemporary American writer, known for environmental writing. The research during her master’s of philology, which she conducted at the same department, was on the translated short stories of Narayan, the first-published Indigenous writer in Malayalam.

Her research interests straddle the intersections of environmental humanities, postcolonialism, Indigenous lives and cultures, cultural studies, South Asian literature, Indian writing in English and translations from regional languages, and Kerala studies. She has presented research papers at various national and international conferences, published research articles, and contributed chapters to edited volumes in the areas of ecocriticism and literature. She is a recipient of the 2022 Translation Grant from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) for her translation of the book Pachaviral: Dayabayude Atmakatha from Malayalam into English.

RCC Research Project: Re-Reading Pachaviral (Green Thumb): A Critical Study of the Life and Works of Dayabai

Selected Publications:

• “Landless, Homeless, and Nameless: Locating Caste in the Environmental In/Justice in Perariyathavar.” In The Routledge Companion to Caste and Cinema in India, edited by Joshil K. Abraham and Judith Misrahi-Barak. Routledge, 2022.
• “Gandhian Environmentalism and its Limits: A Reading of C. K. Janu’s ‘Autobiographic Testimonio’ Mother Forest.” In Gandhi in India’s Literary and Cultural Imagination, edited by Nishat Zaidi and Indrani Das Gupta. Routledge, 2022.
• “Agrarian Distress and Food Sovereignty in the Anthropocene: A Reading of Namita Waikar’s The Long March.” In Anthropocene Ecologies of Food: Notes from the Global South, edited by Simon C. Estok, S. Susan Deborah, and Rayson K. Alex. Routledge, 2022.
• M. N. Vijayan. “Art and Literature as Resistance.” Translated by Rajitha Venugopal. In Ecocriticism in Malayalam, edited by G. Madhusoodanan. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022.
• K. Ayyappa Panicker. “The Aesthetics of Folk Literature.” Translated by Rajitha Venugopal. In Ecocriticism in Malayalam, edited by G. Madhusoodanan. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022.
• “Scripting Lives/Seeking Space: Life Narratives of C. K. Janu and K. Pokkudan.” In Dalit Literature: Reading Resistance, edited by Saroj Kumar Mahananda. Sangharsh Publications, 2013.