Rukmini Bhaya Nair

RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR is Professor of Linguistics and English at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1982 and a second honoris causa degree in 2006 from the University of Antwerp for her original work in the areas of linguistics, cognition, narrative and postcolonial theory. She has been Visiting Professor at the Department of English, Stanford University and the University of Washington at Seattle as well as a Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences at Cambridge. Her most recent award (2009) is a Senior Nehru NMML Fellowship and her most recent reading was at the Struga Poetry Festival, Macedonia, in August 2009, which had invited representatives from all five continents and over fifty countries.

In 1990, Nair won the first prize in the All India Poetry Society/British Council competition and in 2000 was selected as a ‘Face of the Millennium’ in a national survey of writers. Called ‘the first significant post-modern poet in Indian English’, she is currently working on a fourth volume of poems, Shataka – on the Mumbai terror attack – inspired by the work of the 6^th century Sanskrit grammarian-poet, Bhartrhari. Other forthcoming works in 2010 comprise monographs on the evolutionary value of deception and on Salman Rushdie as well as a pair of first-time novels entitled Mad Girl’s Love Song and Attachment.

As the editor of Biblio, a leading Indian literary and cultural review journal, she is part of the Australian Radio National’s panel of experts for its well-known ‘Book Show’ programme. In addition, she contributes to all major national dailies and magazines, is on the editorial boards of several academic journals and is a frequent speaker on Mark Tully’s BBC broadcast ‘Something Understood’.

Nair’s writings, both creative and critical, are taught on courses at universities such as Chicago, Delhi, the Open University, UK and Toronto; and she has delivered invited lectures and done poetry readings at over twenty foreign universities from Aarhus and Berkeley to Toronto and Xinxiang. Her books include: The Hyoid Bone: Poems (Viking Penguin, 1992); Technobrat: Culture in a Cybernetic Classroom (Harper Collins, 1997); The Ayodhya Cantos: Poems (Viking Penguin, 1999); Translation, Text and Theory: the Paradigm of India (ed: Sage, 2002); Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: the Idea of Indifference (Minnesota University Press and Oxford University Press, 2002); Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture (Oxford University Press and Routledge, 2003); Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2004); Poetry in a Time of Terror: Essays in the Postcolonial Preternatural (Oxford University Press, 2009).

The great ambition Nair nurtures is just to continue to write and research whatever the genre – and whatever the odds. She is married, has two children and has recently acquired a ginger cat who, like the rest of the family, tolerates her foibles with considerable good humour.