The persona of Draupadi in The Mahabharata is an enigmatic portrayal of contradictions. Her body is the site on which the entire saga of power and control unfolds. Conceived in hate, she is born to restore power. She is left vulnerable to male gaze-her body a text inscribed by the rules of patriarchy. Objectified and allocated like a commodity, caught in a web of the hyper-phallic enterprise of war and aggrandizement, silenced or made a spokesperson of the establishment, Draupadi loses her all, and then her sense of self when she is blamed by Yudhisthira and left to die on the Himalayas. Yet we find Draupadi directing the course of the narrative. She is the catalyst to the unfortunate chain of events that leads to the decimation of the Kauravas. What is denied her in the metanarrative is usurped by her in the retellings. As Bharati's Panchali, or Devi's Dopdi, or Ray's Yajnaseni, she transcends the gendered ventriloquism of an essentially male preserve and renegotiates the margin. This paper reads how Draupadi, a gendered subaltern in a phallogocentric milieu, questions the culture of violence and emerges as the mascot of feminist assertion. The paper traces her journey from submission to subversion and follows the trajectory of her empowerment from a postcolonial and gender perspective.

The city of Mumbai, India, has always been represented in fictional narratives and mainstream Bollywood cinema as the land of endless opportunities, unfathomable surprises, and awe-inspiring success stories. The most educated migrants who come to the city from elsewhere (fortified by language and hope) aspire for a permanent address or a living space to call their own or to belong. And in fact, many of them do succeed in their aspirations and enterprises. However, the focus of this paper is on the scamper for space amongst the migrant middle class and particularly the process of appropriation and contestation for common spaces like corridor, terrace, and compound in the apartments. The paper argues as to how these acts of the migrants are orchestrated to inform and re-evoke their sense of being and identity. And this happens in cities such as Mumbai, as newer identities are being configured each day, resulting in complexities and threats of erasure. The argument is substantiated by the first author's own experiences and memories of the city. In addition, the paper also borrows from the narratives of Chandrima Pal, Gregory David Roberts, Vapu, and Rohinton Mistry.

The paper argues that the rise of collaborative autobiographies from Kerala entails a misrepresentation rooted in the conception of the marginal exotic. It is triggered by capitalist interests which help produce and disseminate these narratives across the globe, particularly the English translations. Authenticity as construed by the collaborator-translator nexus manifests itself explicitly through paratextual addendums. They exist solely as interpolative superfluities, artistic or critical, which serve to severely limit the epistemological possibilities and subtexts that the life-narrative houses. In this study, Mayilamma's collaborative autobiography, Mayilamma: Oru Jeevitham (MOJ), and its translation, Mayilamma: The Life of a Tribal Eco-Warrior (MLTEW), are looked at in detail, exploring the politics of market and authenticity at play in the production and dissemination of the said texts. The paratextual elements, specifically in MLTEW, are analyzed as examples for the production of a marginal exotic tailored to suit the literary framework envisaged by the Western liberal literati and the vernacular elite renderings of authentic tribal culture.

Adivasis constitute more than 22 percent of the population of Odisha. Their simple lives have provided writers with a lot of stuff for literary imagination. A survey of Odia literature down the years shows that Odia writers became interested in these indigenous people particularly after the colonization of Odisha in 1803. For administrative purposes, colonial rulers came in contact with the Adivasis and started writing ethnographic details about them, in which they were portrayed as savages. With the emergence of the Odia middle class toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Adivasis got a place in the literary imagination of Odia middle-class writers. This class showed interest in the Adivasis' lives and wrote both fictions and nonfictions about them, which were published in the emerging periodicals of that time. This paper proposes to study the predecessors of this novelization of Adivasi life. It analyzes the first four decades of the twentieth century when interest in the Adivasis gradually increased in Odisha. The paper confines itself to the Odia literary imagination of the Adivasis before the publication of Paraja (1945), a classic on Adivasi life. The role of the middle class in creating this world has also been discussed.

The Covid-19 crisis is unprecedented in every sphere of life. All businesses hit by Covid-19 have one factor in common: they are all proximate businesses where people come nearer like school education, restaurants, real estate services, and travel and hospitality. Whereas businesses like online education, digital payments, video conferencing, and ecommerce, where the final product is consumed singularly without others' physical presence, have thrived. In addition to these singular businesses, the healthcare products sector and also the innumerable startups which rely on apps and people's immobility have seen exemplary boom. Despite the hardships that the teachers and the students faced during the Covid-19 pandemic, the teachers' resilience and reluctance to submit to the coronavirus has made history in the technology-mediated higher education across the world in general and the Indian subcontinent in particular. This paper deliberates on the innovations and strides made in the language classrooms of the higher education portals during the pandemic period.

During and after the Covid-19-induced lockdown, online teaching has attained an unprecedented status like never before all over the world. Teachers and students have been compelled to fall in line with the new normal of virtual classrooms. Even though many teachers and students have expressed their inconvenience of virtual classrooms, it has become mandatory to adapt their teaching and learning styles to cope with the exasperating times triggered by the coronavirus. The survey presented in this paper was conducted among second and third-year engineering students of a private university in India just before the Covid-19 outbreak. The objective of the survey was to understand which method is more suitable for learning English skills for the engineering students. The students' attitude and perception toward online and teacher-led sessions have been unveiled through qualitative and quantitative data. The participants have weighed the pros and cons of both the methods according to their specific needs, and the results suggest that in order to have a balanced teaching-learning process, the students require both the methods. It has been identified that students' needs play a major role while choosing between online or teacher-led sessions. Though the modern generation relies more on technology, teacher-led sessions have not lost the sheen and are considered an effective way of learning due to various factors such as human interaction, direct guidance, and knowledge-sharing possibilities.