Makarand Paranjape

Makarand R. Paranjape
Born	31 August 1960 Ahmedabad, Gujarat
Nationality	Indian
Education	MA, PhD in English Literature
Alma mater	St Stephen's College, Delhi University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA
Occupation	Director of Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (Shimla)
Known for	Former Professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi)
Spouse(s)	Sarina ( m. 1987) Devaki Singh ( m. 2006) Gayatri Iyer
Website	www.makarand.com

Makarand R. Paranjape (born 31 August 1960) is an Indian academic, novelist, poet and literary critic. He has been the Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, since August 2018. Prior to this, Paranjape had been a professor of English at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi for 19 years.

Early life

Makarand R. Paranjape was born in 1960 in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. He was educated at the Bishop Cotton Boys' School in Bangalore followed by a B.A. (Hons.) in English at St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, in 1980. Thereafter, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from where he received his M.A. in English Literature and, subsequently, a PhD, in 1985, on the topic Mysticism in Indian English Poetry.

Career

Paranjape started his career in 1980 as a teaching assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and returned to India in 1986 to join the University of Hyderabad, first as lecturer and then reader. In 1994, he joined the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Delhi as an associate professor, and between 1999–2018, he served as professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Paranjape was appointed as Director of IIAS in August 2018.

He has taught undergraduate and postgraduate students for over thirty-five years across the globe, largely in the United States and India, and has written columns for Swarajya, The Print, Open magazine, Sunday Observer, Mail Today, DNA, Business Standard, The Pioneer, and Life Positive. He has published over 175 academic papers in various refereed journals and edited books within the country and abroad. In addition, he is an author of several poems and short stories, over 500 essays, book reviews, and occasional articles in academic and popular periodicals.

He was also General Editor of a series of reprints for rare and out-of-print Indian English titles published by the Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi), the founding Trustee of Samvad India Foundation, a Delhi-based non-profit, public charitable trust, and was the founding editor of Evam: Forum on Indian Representations, an international bi-annual, multi-disciplinary journal on India. He was chairperson for the pan-commonwealth panel of judges in the Europe and South Asia region of the 2008 and 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and served as the Indian host judge in Delhi for the 2010 prize.

Indian Institute of Advanced Study

In August 2018, Paranjape was appointed the Director of Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.

In 2020, it was reported that there were 63 charges of irregularities filed against him by an office-bearer of IIAS (Indian Institute of Advanced Studies) in the month of August, following which he has been engaged in a spat with the Chairman and Vice Chairman at the institution. Paranjape offered a rebuttal to his critics through an interview with The Wire in April 2021. However, it was later reported that he had violated the MoA (memorandum of association) of the institute as its Director, and that it was not any clash with other specific individual heads at the institution.

Political views

Paranjape was sympathetic towards the BJP government in 2016 during the time of the JNU fracas. He had written an article which recommended that the Gandhi–Nehru family should move out of the Congress. In the run-up to the 2019 General Election, Paranjape had written an op-ed supporting the candidacy of the former party president Rahul Gandhi's sister Priyanka Gandhi.

Personal life

Paranjape was married to Sarina in 1987. He later married Devaki Singh in 2006, who is daughter of the former Congress minister Arun Singh. It was reported in the press that the wedding festivities were attended by Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, and Robert Vadra. He is now married to Gayatri Iyer.

Works

Paranjape has published several volumes of poetry. He published a collection of short stories called This Time I Promise It'll Be Different in 1994. He published a novel called The Narrator in 1995. In 2013, Makarand R. Paranjape published a novel called Body Offering.

Criticism

• Mysticism in Indian English Poetry. Delhi: B.R. Publishers, 1988.
• Decolonization and Development: Hind Svaraj Revisioned. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993.
• Nativism: Essays in Literary Criticism. Ed. Sahitya Akademi, 1997
• Towards a Poetics of the Indian English Novel. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2000.
• In Diaspora: Theories, Histories, Texts. Ed. New Delhi: Indialog, 2001
• Saundarya: The Perception and Practice of Beauty in India, Ed. with Harsha V. Sabda, 2004
• Text and Interpretation in Indian Thought. Ed., with Santosh Sareen. New Delhi: Mantra Books, 2004.
• English Studies: Indian Perspectives. Ed., with Amit Sarwal and Aneeta Rajendran. Mantra Books, 2006.
• Another Canon: Indian Texts and Traditions in English. London: Anthem Books, 2009: New Delhi: Anthem Books, 2010 (paperback).
• Altered Destinations: Self, Society, and Nation in India. London: Anthem Books, 2009. New Delhi: Anthem Books, 2010 (paperback).
• Indian English and Vernacular India: Texts and Contexts. New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2010. Ed., with GJV Prasad.
• Bollywood in Australia: Transnationalism and Culture. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2010. Ed., with Andrew Hassam.
• Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2012.
• The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi. London and New York: Routledge, 2014.
• The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi. New Delhi: Random House, 2015.
• Cultural Politics in Modern India: Postcolonial Prospects, Colourful Cosmopolitanism, Global Proximities. New Delhi and Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. ISBN 9781138956926 & ISBN 9781315665450
• Debating the 'post' condition in India : critical vernaculars, unauthorized modernities, post-colonial contentions. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Poetry

• The Serene Flame. Delhi: Rupa & Co, India 1991.
• Playing the Dark God. Delhi: Rupa & Co, India 1992.
• Used Book. New Delhi: Indialog Publications, New Delhi 2001.
• Partial Disclosure. New Delhi: Mantra Books, India 2005.
• Confluence. New Delhi: Samvad India, India 2007.
• Transit Passenger/Passageiro em Transito. Sao Paulo: University of Sao Paolo Press, 2016. ISBN 9788577322800

Fiction

• This Time I Promise It'll Be Different: Short Stories. New Delhi: UBS Publishers, 1994.
• The Narrator: A Novel. New Delhi: Rupa, 1995.
• Body Offering. New Delhi: Rupa, 2013.

Edited books

• Indian Poetry in English. Madras: Macmillan, 1993.
• An Anthology of New Indian English Poetry. Delhi: Rupa, 1994.
• Sarojini Naidu: Selected Letters. Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996.
• The Spirit's Manifest Home: The Story of Sri Aurobindo Ashram-Delhi Branch. New Delhi:Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1997.
• The Best of Raja Rao. New Delhi: Katha, 1998.
• The Penguin Sri Aurobindo Reader. New Delhi: Penguin, 1999.
• The Little Book of Sri Aurobindo. New Delhi: Penguin, 2001. Dehejia. New Delhi: Samvad India, 2003.
• The Penguin Swami Vivekananda Reader. New Delhi, 2005.
• The Cyclonic Swami: Vivekananda in the West. With Sukalyan Sengupta. New Delhi: Samvad India, 2005.
• Dharma and Development: The Future of Survival. New Delhi: Samvad India, 2005.
• Science and Spirituality in Modern India. New Delhi: Samvad India, 2006.
• Earth Lessons: Three Essays on Saving the Planet. New Delhi: Vikram Sarabhai Foundation, 2008. (With Devaki Singh).
• Science, Spirituality and the Modernization of India. New Delhi: Anthem, 2008.
• Sacred Australia: Post-secular considerations. Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan, 2009; Indian Edition, with new Foreword and Preface, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 2010.
• Sarojini Naidu: Selected Poetry and Prose. Delhi: HarperCollins India, 1993; 2nd. rev. ed., New Delhi: Rupa, 2010.
• Indian English and Vernacular India. Co-edited with G. J. V. Prasad. New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2010.
• Bollywood in Australia: Transnationalism and Culture. Co-edited with Andrew39 Hassam. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2010.
• Healing across Boundaries: Biomedicine and Alternative Therapeutics. New Delhi and London: Routledge, 2014.
• Swami Vivekananda: A Contemporary Reader. New Delhi: Routledge, 2015, ISBN 978-1-138-82206-1.
• Critical posthumanism and planetary futures. New Delhi: Springer, 2016.
• Nativism : essay in criticism. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2017.
• New perspectives in Indian science and civilisation. New York: Routledge, 2020.

Translation

• Boats from the Marathi original 'Hodya' by Hemant Govind Joglekar. New Delhi: B.R. Publishers, 1994

Appearances in the following poetry Anthologies :

• Travelogue : The Grand Indian Express (2018) ed. by Dr. Ananad Kumar and published by Authorspress, New Delhi
• A New Book of Indian Poems In English (2000) ed. by Gopi Kottoor and published by Poetry Chain and Writers Workshop, Calcutta
• A Decade of Poetry ( 1997–98 ) eds. Prabhanjan K. Mishra , Menka Shivdasani, Jerry Pinto and Ranjit Hoskote Special edition (Vols. 6 and 7) of Poiesis : A Journal of Poetry Circle, Bombay

Honours

• Homi Bhabha Fellow for Literature, 1991–1993.
• Visiting professor, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 1996.
• Shastri Indo-Canadian Research fellow, University of Calgary, Canada, Summer 2000. Visiting Professor, Ball State University, Indiana, US, Fall 2001.
• IFUSS Fellow, University of Iowa, Iowa City, US, Summer 2002.
• Mellon fellow, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Summer 2003 and summer 2004.
• Coordinator, UGC Special Assistance Programme, 2003 onwards.
• Joint-coordinator, China-India inter-cultural dialogue, 2004–2005.
• GPSS research award, 2005–2006.
• Australia India Council fellow, 2005–2006.
• GPSS Major Award 2006–2009.
• Chair of the Jury for South Asia and Europe of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2007–2009.
• Visiting professor, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, April–October 2009.
• Shivdasani Visiting fellow, Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, University of Oxford, Michaelmas Term, 2009 (October–December).
• ICCR Chair in Indian Studies, National University of Singapore, August 2010 onwards.
• CAPES Visiting Professor, University of São Paulo, Brazil, August–December 2011.
• Meenakshi Mukherjee Prize for the best published academic paper in India, 2010–2011, awarded by Indian Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Association.
• Summer 2014: Awarded (but could not accept) visiting fellowship under the "Research Excellence Program of University of Santiago de Compostela – India (PEIN) for the year 2013–2014.
• October–December 2014: Inaugural DAAD-Eric Auerbach Visiting Chair in World Literatures at the University of Tübingen, Germany.
• January–April 2015: Visiting senior research fellow, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

External links

• The Official Makarand Paranjape Webpage
• Makarand Paranjape Webpage at JNU

See also

• Indian English Literature
• Indian Writing in English

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