Lectures
Tuesday, 26 November 2024
Dr Achyut Chetan
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Sido Kanhu Murmu University
Our constitutional vision of the right to equality, the right to life, liberty, freedom of conscience, secularism, citizenship, and the relation between the fundamental rights and the directive principles have all been deeply inflected by an ethics that was shaped by the women’s movement. Women’s participation was an inevitable culmination of decades of feminist practice and thought and its recognition has the potential of bringing an immense interpretive shift in the Indian Constitutional discourse. The lecture presented the contributions of women to the framing of the Constitution of India, focusing specially on the work of Hansa Mehta, Renuka Ray, Amrit Kaur, Durgabai Deshmukh, Purnima Banerji, Begum Rasul, and Dakshayani Velayudhan to show that the Constitution owes its moral vision substantially to the intervention of these women framers. They compelled the ‘founding fathers’ to include components of their feminist moral imaginary in the Constitution. They gendered the debates and ensured that the Constitution became a document of human rights and women’s rights as well. Many articles of the Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles owe their distinctinve features to their interventions and the constitutional text is replete with the authorial intentions of these mothers who have been missing from history.
Monday, 25 November 2024
Dr D.N. Khute
Assistant Professor
School of Studies in History, Pandit Ravishankar Shukla University
Saturday, 21 September 2024
Shri Ashish Chaturvedi
GM–Zonal Manager (Chhattisgarh & Jharkhand)
Punjab National Bank
The Ira Jha Annual Memorial Lecture at the Centre for Culture,
Language, and Traditions at
IIT Bhilai honours the work and legacy of Ms Ira Jha (1957–2024), a
distinguished national
Hindi journalist who was born in Jagdalpur, in undivided Madhya Pradesh. Ms
Jha
started her
career with the Delhi Press in 1983. She moved to Patna in 1984 to work as a
reporter with
the then newly launched Patliputra Times. In 1985, she joined
Navbharat Times as part of the
team that launched the Hindi daily’s Jaipur edition in Rajasthan. She moved
to
Delhi in 1986
and rose the ranks to become the first female Chief Sub Editor in a Hindi
news
desk. In 2003,
after Chhattisgarh was carved out of Madhya Pradesh in 2000, Ms Jha was
tasked
with
coverage of the state's first assembly polls for the national daily
Dainik
Hindustan. In what
was a homecoming for her, Ms Jha hit the ground running and carved a name
for
herself with
her deft coverage of politics and tribal rights in Chhattisgarh. In 2005, Ms
Jha
moved back
to Delhi to head the NCR desk at Dainik Hindustan. After moving on
from
the national daily
in 2009, Ms Jha had stints with The Sunday Indian and as political
editor and bureau chief for
Navabharat Chhattisgarh in Delhi. She served as senior media
advisor at
the National
Commission for Women in 2015–2016.
Ms Jha worked extensively on Chhattisgarh’s politics and culture throughout her career. Her contribution towards highlighting the culture of Bastar and its Maria Gond tribes in the press is well known. From the Rath Yatra in Bastar to the Akhti Teej, she wrote extensively on the festivals celebrated in Chhattisgarh on social media and in print. Her memoirs can be accessed on her blog bastarkimaina.com. Ms Jha’s father, the late Justice S.D. Jha, also hailed from Rajnandgaon in Chhattisgarh and retired as Up-Lokayukt of undivided Madhya Pradesh in the year 2000. Her mother late Smt Veena Jha was a renowned social worker in Jagdalpur.
Through this lecture series, CCLT will invite artists and practitioners from Chhattisgarh to engage with our campus community on the culture and heritage of the state.
Thursday, 15 January 2026
Shri Manoj Verma
Film Director and Producer
Short-term courses
Winter School
Cultural Narratives on Commons
A considerable corpus of contemporary writings on commons has been descriptive in nature, informed by the exigencies of conveying the basic tenets of the concept to not just policy-makers and stakeholders in governance but also practitioners, activists, and even community members at the grassroots. This has had the unintended consequence of diverting critical attention from the constitutive role of language and literature in giving form to belief systems and lived experience, leading to a general lack of understanding on the formative relationship between cultures and practices of commoning and their articulation in literary texts. This course attempts to offer a corrective in this direction by focusing on the convergences between the lived experience and socio-cultural realities of commons and the modes and mores in which these have been articulated in the South Asian context.
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Planning and the Everyday in urban South Asia
Over the past century, urban writing from South Asia has displayed an acute awareness of the destabilising impact of the manner in which our cities have refashioned themselves through the normalisation of spatial and infrastructural violence. The literary response to these transformations has been inventive in terms of form as well as content: not only do we have new kinds of stories to relate, we are also narrating them in new ways. Foregrounding literary texts as mediators of lived experience allows for a more granular understanding of the deep imprint of modern planning apparatuses on the everyday in urban South Asia. This allows for a strategic unpacking of these apparatuses, in ways which reveals their will to power and creates possibilities for dialogue and intervention.
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Commoning the Commons
In a world where the control and management of resources has been divided between individuals and the state, commons offer a powerful pathway to re-imagine and re-organize our relationships with each other and with nature. Over time, the meaning and idea of commons has expanded to include other types of shared natural resources such as oceans, atmosphere, and space that transcend national boundaries. This idea also includes other forms of shared resources, such as knowledge, seeds, culture, or collective spaces including shared digital platforms. While the idea of commons may seem abstract, it is an active and living process expressed through acts of mutual support, conflict, negotiation, communication, and experimentation that have played a significant role in managing and sustaining our shared resources. Recognizing and restoring the rights and agency of communities to shared natural systems can help in unlocking the true potential of community stewardship and lead to emergence of many promising and practical approaches to the governance of our shared resources.