Arts and Humanities, Literature and Literary Theory, Religious studies, Language and Linguistics
21
Scopus Publications
Scopus Publications
Sons and Mother-Land: Gendered Performance of Nationality and Its Criticism in Indian Cinema-Texts Atul Kumar Singh, Prabha Shankar Dwivedi Shidnij Svit, 2026 As nation is construed as a category of identification, it needs to be continually performed and most of these performances remain gendered in nature, especially with the maternalisation of the nation and territory. Cinema, with its power to impact millions, becomes one of those powerful mediums through which gendered performances of nation takes place. In this article, we look at some of these sites of production of gendered nationalism to study the complex ways in which the idea and discourse of Mother Nation is performed on the celluloid screen. The article also analyses cinema as a participatory space where performances ideologically confront each other as it looks at the films which look critically at the maternal rhetoric of nationalism and question or reject the sacrificial narrative of motherland. Looking at the case of certain films in South India, we also analyse such cine-narratives which come from a culturally and linguistically distinct location from the aspirational territory of Bharat Mata to see how maternal invocations from these sites complicate the gendered representation of nationality and bring a dynamic discourse of identity assertion.
Theology or discourse on ecology? Reading Śiva Mahāpurāṇa as an ecoaesthetical text , Prabha Shankar Dwivedi, Shashwat Pandeya, and Crossroads, 2025 This paper explores the Śiva Mahāpurāṇa through an ecoaesthetical lens, revealing its relevance in countering the anthropocentric worldview that emerged from European Enlightenment ideals. While modernity often established a hierarchical divide between humans and nature, Hindu philosophy, as seen in the Śiva Mahāpurāṇa, emphasizes the interconnectedness of all beings and the inherent divinity within both human and non-human entities. The text advocates for an ethical, non-exploitative relationship with the environment, highlighting reverence, responsibility, and harmonious coexistence. By integrating theological reflections with ecological consciousness, the Śiva Mahāpurāṇa presents a compelling framework for fostering eco-centric ethics. This study underscores the text’s potential to inspire a deeper spiritual connection to nature, providing valuable insights for addressing contemporary ecological challenges. Ultimately, the Śiva Mahāpurāṇa transcends its theological origins to serve as a profound ecoaesthetical guide, urging us to rethink our relationship with the natural world and to embrace a more sustainable, compassionate approach to ecological stewardship.
A Comparative Reading of Pāṇinian Grammatical Tradition and Modern Science of Speech Dwivedi, P.S., Singh, A.K. Research Result Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 2025 The modern history of Western linguistics began with comparative philology and coincided with the colonisation of the East for a long time.The colonisation as a process not only involved an interplay of power, dominance and state, it was also a conquest of knowledge. Colonies such as India had a vast rubric of ancient knowledge and especially excelled in linguistics and philology. This paper is an attempt to showcase how the roots of various phonetic and phonological theories that defined and dominated modern linguistics were linked to the ancient Indian grammatical tradition. Scholars from Pāṇinian School of Grammar, such as Pāṇini, Kātyāyana, Patañjali, and Bhartṛhari, have explained a range of speech phenomena to which modern phonetics and phonology correspond significantly. This paper analyses the common grounds between prominent schools of Western phonology and their Indian counterparts and thus highlights a significant theoretical overlap between the knowledge offered by the Western linguistic schools and what was explained several centuries back by prominent Indian grammarians. From the linking of sounds to the psychological reality of a phoneme, the vast canvas of the Indian linguistic tradition could be verifiably seen as a precursor to the most of the structural turn in the twentieth century. Finally, the paper attempts to show the precedence of various recent concepts and theories, such as ‘distinctive feature theory’ or ‘generative grammar’ in the texts like Aṣṭādhyāyī and Vākyapdīya.
From local to global: Village YouTubers and rural creator cultures in South India Srikanth Nayaka, Vamshi Krishna Reddy Vemireddy, Prabha Shankar Dwivedi International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2025 This article examines emerging rural creator cultures in South India. Specifically, it focuses on the uptake and production of YouTube videos by village creators, a relatively understudied but increasingly important phenomenon given the rapid spread of social media entertainment in rural India. Through a case study on My Village Show, a YouTube media collective, this article shows how rural cultural producers transformed into ‘media workers’, ‘creators’, and ‘influencers’. The South Indian YouTubing landscape, with a multitude of village-centric social media entertainment channels, reveals a new dynamic of cultural production in the Global South, distinguished by collective, collaborative, and formalizing creator labor practices. Drawing upon ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with rural cultural producers, this article analyzes and conceptualizes rural creator cultures within particular socio-cultural, vernacular, and regional dynamics in India.
Understanding the Śabda-Vākya Dichotomy: An Inquiry into Bhartṛhari’s Concept of Akhaṅḍapakṣa Iup Journal of English Studies, 2024
YouTube and the production of online video cultures in Rural South India Srikanth Nayaka, Vamshi Krishna Reddy Vemireddy, Prabha Shankar Dwivedi International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2024 This article examines how a group of villagers in rural South India shot to online fame by posting entertaining audio-visual content on YouTube. Motivated to showcase the countryside culture, villagers began sharing short videos depicting their daily rural lives. Some of their videos have gone viral, garnered millions of views, and amassed thousands of subscribers. Inspired by the positive reception, village video makers have taken their YouTube productions professionally and created a unique brand identity for their media content. From short films to web series, village video-makers produce a wide variety of audio-visual content. Village video creators have accumulated a massive online following, digital stardom, and social media fame. This paper maps the emerging vernacular online video-sharing cultures and the rise of rural micro-celebrities through a close reading of a specific case study, 'my village show, ' one of the popular village-based YouTube channels in South India.
ECO-ETHICS OR THEO-ETHICS? Situating Sītā in and out of the Vedic and the Post-Vedic Societies Journal of Dharma, 2023
Ideologies of Masculinity and Femininity in the Projection of the ‘National Language’: Gendered Discourse of Hindi–Urdu Dichotomization and Standardization Atul Kumar Singh, Prabha Shankar Dwivedi Journal of Human Values, 2023 This article takes the linguistic space of North India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and tries to see how a nationalistic linguistic ideology that was shaping up at that time, creating Hindi and Urdu linguistic communities, used gender as a tool to portray and assert a masculinist vision of language and nation. It involved not just censoring certain representations of women and their cultural spaces, but also using the issue of ‘vulgar’ representations as a premise to marginalize certain languages and their literature. The article looks at the colonial ideology that worked as an enforcer for the nationalists to work towards achieving what they felt as a sanitized and moral form of literature and culture. The linguistic ideology that accompanied these revisions was of projecting Hindi (Khari Boli) as a national language while limiting spaces of other languages, such as Braj, Urdu and Bhojpuri, in the region, by criticizing either their use of sexual imagery or by stereotyping them in a gendered way. This article investigates the arguments of nationalist writers and highlights their masculinist and patriarchal ideas in their bid for the new national language.
Psychological impact of domestic violence on women in India due to COVID-19 Priyanka Tripathi, Prabha S. Dwivedi, Shreya Sharma International Journal of Human Rights in Healthcare, 2023 Purpose The COVID-19 outbreak has significant psychological effects because of reduced support system and social quarantine, making women the worst-hit population of shadow pandemic, i.e. domestic violence. While food shortages, unemployment and increased domestic-work burdens are the immediate effects of the lockdown, women at home have to bear its far-reaching impacts in the long term in the form of domestic abuse, making the study of the psychological impact of domestic violence against women imperative. This paper aims to identify the factors and causes responsible for domestic violence and its psychological impacts on women in different aspects. This paper further focuses on the reasons behind an escalation in psychological violence against women. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on extrapolating data from various journal articles, Indian Government reports, newspaper articles and other printed materials that are recent, relevant and discuss domestic violence and mental stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers use Indian National Commission for Women’s (NCW) data on complaints received regarding violence against women and domestic abuse in the year 2020 and 15 journal articles that discuss domestic violence against women during the COVID-19 period in different countries to discuss social inequalities and power relations impact on women’ mental health. Findings The findings suggest that economic instability during the pandemic and social and cultural norms of India ignited psychological abuse against women during the pandemic. The number of monthly complaints of dowry death, dowry harassment and protection of women against domestic violence reflect on increased registered complaints in the postlockdown period in the year 2020. The number of monthly complaints received by the NCW from January 2020 to December 2020 in India represents that WhatsApp chat is a powerful tool for reporting domestic violence. Originality/value The pandemic lockdown has an adverse psychological impact on women, making them suffer from posttraumatic symptoms, substance abuse, panic attacks, depressions, hallucinations, eating disorders, self-harm, etc. This paper strives to reflect upon mitigation strategies to curb domestic violence in India.
RE-GESTATING THE ECO-ETHICS OF RĀMĀYAṆA IN ANTHROPOCENE: An Eco-Aesthetical Approach Journal of Dharma, 2023
• Dialectics of Prakṛti and Sanskṛti: An Ecosophical Study of the Select Ancient Indian Texts, Sponsored Research Project Grant, JPN Center of Excellence in Humanities, IIT Indore, M.P. 2023-2025 (Role: Principal Investigator).
• Folk and Ritual Songs of Banaras and Mirzapur: An Ethnographic Study, Sponsored Research Project Grant, Indian Council for Social Science Research, New Delhi, 2022-24 (Role: Co-Principal Investigator).
• Mapping Domestic Abuse and Violence in the time of Covid-19: A Study from Bihar, Special Grant for Research on Social Science Dimensions of Covid-19 Coronavirus Pandemic, Indian Council for Social Science Research, New Delhi, 2021 (Role: Co-Principal Investigator).
• Pāṇinīan School of Grammar: A Seat of Modern Linguistics and (Post)Structuralist Poetics, Sponsored Research Project Grant, Indian Council for Social Science Research, New Delhi, 2019-2021 (Role: Principal Investigator).
