Charting a narrative for the apocalypse: Adapting the Indian mythological epic, The Mahabharata, for a global audience, while exploring the continuing influence of Indian myths on contemporary popular Hindi cinema and exploiting this connection to craft a new storytelling paradigm.

Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (An adaptation of Joseph Campbell’s work on the Hero’s Journey), created a storytelling paradigm that works foremost as an individual narrative, structured around a ‘Hero’. Storytelling exercises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and the Baahubali franchise immerse the audiences into intricate, sprawling universes that follow different trajectories with multiple foci. Using the Baahubali franchise for the scope that it offers, this work points to certain limitations of the storytelling paradigm suggested by Vogler. In addition to re-establishing the intricate relationship between mythical and modern narratives, especially cinema, this work furthermore proposes that the building blocks for a new kind of narrative journey already exist in Indian Mythology, specifically the Mahabharata, a megalithic story that unravels without a central heroic figure and comprises multiple intricately connected narratives, extending in different temporal and geographical directions. Section 1 of this work makes an argument for this storytelling paradigm and then establishes its schema in detail. Section 1 ends with a discussion on the possibilities and scope of this unified narrative model that would help storytellers craft these complicated universes, from start to finish, across various mediums. Section 2 (submitted separately) contains the creative work, an adaptation of the Mahabharata in two screenplays constructed using this paradigm. It can be viewed in hard copy at the National Library for Wales and the Arts and Social Studies Library at Cardiff University

Birth of a Goddess: Reclaiming the ‘Shakti’ (Divine Feminine Power)

In my thesis project, I envision creating a space where one can experience the true ‘Shakti’ of the eternal Goddess i.e., the energy/force responsible for the entire creation, and rediscover this ‘Shakti’ within. I attempt to change the narrative around South Asian women through performance and storytelling. Creating a speculative story set in history I reimagine the present and future, as our past is not dead but lives through us constantly. This work challenges the patriarchal norms that still exist in South Asian communities across the globe and discusses the problematic approach to decolonizing by these communities

"Inbetweeners" : dialogic strategies and practices for writing Arab migration through intercultural theatre : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

This thesis deploys both critical and creative methodologies to address the research question ‘How can playwriting contribute to an understanding of intercultural experiences, identities, and differences between the Middle East and the West?’ When I began this research journey, as a Jordanian-born Muslim playwright now living in Aotearoa New Zealand, I wanted to write a ‘great Arab theatre’ to capture the potentials and positive outcomes of the immigration experiences of Middle Easterners and Muslims and their transnational movements, re-settlements, and inbetweenness, as well as acknowledge the suffering of a region that has been subjected to generations of colonial trauma and is little understood and deeply stereotyped by the West. I wanted to creatively investigate the ways in which migration, and now a global pandemic that has rewritten our understanding of borders, have both fractured and expanded my viewpoints on myself, my culture, and my birthplace. As I explored scholarly models of trauma, I discovered that they, too, have been characterised by colonial thinking and often deploy limited cultural stereotypes as metaphors to explain and address trauma. None of these models fit my experiences. There are uniquely Arab models of storytelling and performance but, looking at many of the key playwrights from the region showed a deep interweaving of Western playwriting traditions in their work as well. Again, these Western-influenced elements seemed to me in part useful yet ultimately inadequate containers to hold my experiences or grasp the wider backdrop of my region’s complex and contested histories. My goal became to find new, expanded, theatrical forms to initiate a dialogue between concepts of diasporic identity, trauma, conflict, and colonial history in the context of the Middle East and its relationships with its Others - including through the specific trajectory of my own journey and how my subjectivity has been shattered and reformed by multiple transnational relocations. I found it helpful to draw on scholarship about intercultural theatre, but I also developed new models of structure and characterisation that depart from and explicitly reject Western models in novel ways, to try to capture the uniqueness of ‘inbetweenness’ that is symptomatic of my region, myself, and my culture. Linear temporality, fixed characterisation, discrete scene plotting, causal action sequences, character hierarchies, and monolingual, unequivocally purposeful dialogue are all rejected in my playwriting, in favour of forms that I found, through the experiment of writing, better reflected the exploded and shapeshifting terms of identity and experience that I know to be true for myself and many others who have, like me, spanned their lives across continents, cultures, languages, religions, traditions, and histories, then ended up finding it difficult to know what is real. In my playwriting, I wanted to recreate that hybridity of both peaceful and contentious cross-cultural exchange and so I developed a kaleidoscopic metaphor to express a blend of different elements that change perpetually and move disorientingly, yet emerge anew, creatively and beautifully. Deploying my kaleidoscopic model of playwriting both thematically and structurally, I wrote a script that conveyed at least some partial sense of what it might mean to be ‘Arab’ in today’s world, and especially, what it might feel like to be ‘Arab’ in Aotearoa. The research was conducted, and the thesis is submitted, in the discipline of creative writing. It is the playwriting itself that constitutes the research experiment, along with the exegetic material that observes and analyses the act of creation including the aesthetic techniques, sources, and motivations. The thesis thus begins with four critical chapters that set out the background to and rationale for the creative work, then concludes with “Aragoze”, a trilogy of plays that embodies the aims of the research to contribute through both its form and its content to an understanding of intercultural experiences and identities situated in between the Middle East and the West

Offering Herstory: The Alternative Narratives of Cassandra in Euripides’ tragedy Trojan women

This presentation was meant to shed light on focal points of Euripides’ vs Aeschylus’ character of the Trojan prophetess Cassandra via textual analysis of dramatic text, gender studies of Greek drama, offering an overview of her imagery through selected pottery paintings, and bringing a touch of feminist literary criticism for the end.‘Modern’ Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender and Antiquity, 5-7/3/2021, University of Sydney. [held online

When Sita met Belle: an Indian woman finds her voice through re-visioning fairy tales.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.The dissertation comprises a creative component and a reflection paper. The creative component is a novella titled “When Sita Met Belle.” The novella engages with the Beauty and the Beast narrative written from an Indian woman’s perspective and set in a South African context. It draws upon the experiences of Sita from Tulsidasa’s Sri Ramacharitamanasa and Belle from Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s La Belle et la Bête, or Beauty and the Beast. Belle and Sita are alike in their voiceless qualities and experiences, which reverberate through the female characters in “When Sita Met Belle.” Each chapter is based on a different strand of the Beauty and the Beast narrative. The epigraphs from the Sri Ramacharitamanas create the overarching mood of Sita’s experiences in the creative component and connect with the Indian context of the piece. The reflection paper discusses the re-visioning of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale from a modern feminist point of view incorporating elements from Sri Ramacharitamanasa. It explores the re-visioning of a fairy tale from a feminist angle, outlining previous re-visions of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, the contributions by Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter as writers who have influenced this re-vision, the contextualisation of the Beauty and the Beast narrative, the depiction of Sita and Belle in their relative stories, and the Disney treatment of fairy tales. Thereafter there is an explanation of my choices of re-visioning in the novella and a summary of the necessity of re-visioning fairy tales. The reflection paper comments on encouraging female agency lacking in the protagonists of Belle and Sita, and reveals how this is achieved through a re-vision. Of the two genders, only one can truly encapsulate and convey the female experience in a creative and positive expression. As both the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast and the Hindu text of Sri Ramacharitamanasa are adaptable to the times, they offer the possibility of a re-vision which makes heroes of heroines

Ruskin Bond as a short story writer : A critical study

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Dalit writing in the 21st century: activism and literary aesthetics in contemporary India

This thesis is an exploration of the relationship between Dalit activism and literature through an analysis of literature published in the 21st century. I argue that contemporary literature has a fundamentally different relationship with the activist project than that of forty years ago. Since the inception of the Dalit Panthers in the early 1970s, Dalit literature has been inextricably tied to the activist project, with many Dalit activists using literature as an extension of their activism. In this thesis, I argue that this close relationship has changed as we have entered the 21st century. I argue that although contemporary Dalit literature often reflects the concerns of political and social activists, contemporary writers are becoming ever more concerned with literary experimentation and innovation. This focus on literary style and form comes at a moment when writers are beginning to represent Dalit communities in a more positive light, rather than focusing on the pain and degradation of Dalit lives. This combination has created a different kind of Dalit literature that is radically different from its predecessors. I explore what kind of relationship this literature has with the contemporary activist and political world, whilst also exploring how Dalit art and culture has the potential to inspire a new generation of Dalits and give them a feeling of self-respect. This thesis also explores how Dalits turn to other religions in a bid to reject the dogma of Hinduism which sees them as untouchable, as well as analysing the use of Dalit gods within contemporary Dalit literature. This research offers a radically different perspective of Dalit literature that does not position it as a sociological account of Dalit life. Instead, this thesis views Dalit literature as art in its own right that is infused with the creative energy of Dalit communities. This creativity, in the form of Dalit literature, points towards a positive route towards self-respect for Dalits that does not need to rely on the narratives of suffering upon which Dalit literature was founded

Las caras cambiantes de las mujeres en la India, a través de las lentes de arte y artistas activistas

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, leída el 22-07-2020The aim of this thesis is to study the changing status of women in India through their representation and practices in art. To evaluate how art practices of Indian women might be addressing empowerment, promoting socio-economic and progressive cultures. I base my arguments on the premise that art has the power to transform societies, as affirmed by Ernst Fischer in his essay The Necessity of Art.7This thesis attempts to analyse the impact of privileged and rural artists practices, their feminist and humanist concerns. The study was inspired by two pioneering exhibitions. Tiger by the Tail! Women Artists of India Transforming Culture, held at the Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, Boston;8 almost coincidental with Global Feminisms in the Brooklyn museum...El objetivo principal de esta tesis es estudiar los cambios en la situación de la mujer en India a través de su representación en el arte y sus prácticas artísticas. Examino cómo podrían abordar cuestiones de empoderamiento, promover mejoras socioeconómicas y culturas progresistas. Parte de la premisa del poder del arte para forjar avances en las sociedades, tal como recoge Ernst Fischer en su ensayo The Necessity of Art.1Analizo el impacto del trabajo de las artistas privilegiadas y rurales, y sus preocupaciones feministas y humanistas. Esta investigación empezó con dos exposiciones pioneras...Fac. de Ciencias Políticas y SociologíaTRUEunpu

Deconstructing her: a study of four female characters in Christian and Hindu texts

Centuries of male dominance have led to alterations and misinterpretations of religious texts, leading to ambiguity regarding the women in these narratives. This research engages with key texts of Hinduism and Christianity using literary analysis of the construction, presentation, and reception of the primary female characters: Mary of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene in the Christian New Testament; Sītā from the Rāmāyaṇa, and Draupadī from the Mahābhārata.This study examines the passages where these women are mentioned, and goes on to attempt a character reconstruction and challenge their popular stereotypical reception. The research is divided into four chapters beginning with Mary of Nazareth where her presence in the New Testament is traced through the Gospels. Passages emphasizing Mary’s unwavering faith in God, her bravery, and her attempts to understand the divine events around her, are highlighted in order to demonstrate that she was more than a passive, obedient mother. Next, the four Gospels are examined to reconstruct Mary Magdalene’s loyalty towards Jesus and his cause. Further, the passages that have been wrongly attributed to her are highlighted to get to the roots of the misconception that Mary was a woman engaged in prostitution. The study then moves to the Puranic Hindu texts and first examines Sītā by exploring her divinity, rage, intelligence, and bravery, a portrayal that contrasts to the modern reception of her character. Finally, popular myths about Draupadī are challenged as the study outlines her divine origins, her multiple public humiliations, her justified anger, and her spirited debates with the men around her. The study concludes with a contribution to feminist exploration and comparative theology of sacred texts through a comparative theological analysis of the four women in these texts