Rukmini bhaya nair

RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR is Professor of Linguistics and English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She obtained her doctoral degree at the University of Cambridge in 1982 and has since taught and lectured at various universities. These include the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, the National University of Singapore, Toronto University and the Universities of Washington at Seattle and California at Berkeley. She has also been nominated for a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford. From the time she won, as a student, an Essay Prize in a competition organized by La Stampa, Le Monde, Die Welt and The Times in conjunction with the First International Exhibition on Man & his Environment, Turin, Italy, Nair has been the recipient of several awards and honours (The J.N. Tata Scholarship, the Hornby and Charles Wallace Awards, the Dorothy Leet Grant etc). In 1990, Nair received the first prize in the All India Poetry Society/ British Council competition. Her work has since appeared in Penguin New Writing in India (1992), in the anthology Mosaic, featuring award-winning writers from the U.K and India (1999) and in Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (2002). It has also been translated into languages ranging from Swedish and Macedonian to Bangla and Hindi. In 1998, Nair was sponsored by the Indian Council of Cultural Relations as a SAARC delegate to Sri Lanka; and in 1999 she gave the G.C. Banerji Annual Lecture at the English Department, University of Mumbai and represented India as a Fellow at the Commonwealth Writers Conference, Cambridge.

The year 2000 saw Nair selected as a ‘Face of the Millennium’ among writers by India Today. In 2001, Nair spoke on postcoloniality at the University of Copenhagen, delivered a plenary on narrative at the International School of Communication Studies, Denmark, read a paper on cognitive processes at the EU conference on The Natural and Cultural Bases of Human Reasoning at the CNRS in Paris and talked on child language at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. In April, 2002 she read a paper at the PALA international conference and her poetry at the International Conference on Literary Semantics, Birmingham, where she was one of four plenary speakers, each representing a different continent (America, Asia, Australia and Europe). In August, 2002, she spoke on postcoloniality and read from her poems at a conference inaugurating a Department of Anglophone Studies in Saarbrucken, Germany and delivered the final plenary at an international seminar on Philosophy, Language and Literature at the University of East Anglia. In 2003, she presented invited papers at an international seminar on the Intellectualization of the African Languages held at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and the biennial International Pragmatics Conference in Toronto, Canada. In October 2003, she delivered another set of invited lectures on her recent books at the Universities of Aarhus, Denmark, where she was a Conference Keynote Speaker, and also at Linköping, Sweden. She was an Invited Speaker at the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in the US. In addition, she was a Keynote Speaker at a recent Conference organized by SOAS, London University, in October 2003.

Apart from her numerous academic publications, Nair contributes to all major national newspapers and magazines from the Times of India to Outlook and is a frequent panelist on programmes such as Mark Tully's iBBC broadcast Something Understood. She also serves on the editorial boards of select journals, including the International Journal of Literary Semantics (Berlin and New York) and Biblio (India), as well as on the International Advisory Panel of the Macmillan Essential Dictionary.

Cognitive linguistics, the philosophy of language and literary and cultural theory comprise Nair’s areas of academic interest, in which domains her work has received worldwide recognition. Nair says that she writes poetry for the same reason that she does research in cognitive linguistics – to attempt to discover the limits of language. The 'polyphonous' literary style that she has consequently developed to help her bring together her interconnected interests in linguistics, cognition, literature and cultural studies has lead to more than one critic calling her "the first significant postmodern poet in Indian English writing." Forthcoming works in 2004 include a study of Salman Rushdie, a book of essays on poetry and a third collection of poems tentatively entitled Yellow Hibiscus. Married, with two children, Rukmini Bhaya Nair lives in Delhi. Her great ambition is simply to continue to research and write, whatever the genre and whatever the odds.