VOL 3 (2018)
BITACORA
Interviews Ms. Mudita Mohile Ms. Mohile has been Asst. Professor with the Department of English since 2004 and is also an alumna of Gargi. In this interview with Bitacora she discusses some of her academic interests, classrooms, pedagogy, and some of her areas of specialisation. Q. Does a student's perspective about a text alter your approach towards it? A. Yes, it does. The way people respond to texts changes on the basis of their own historical context and I think as teachers we have to build that into our pedagogy. Literature is not something that can be taught in isolation. So if there is an overwhelming point of view expressed by the class, I see myself as a learner and try to include that in my teaching practices. Q. How do you think transliteration affects the original aesthetic of the text? A. My position on this has always been that the practice of translation and adaptation, more than transliteration, is never a one way process. It always does the impact the "original", it becomes a lens through which we view that original. I've taught Sanskrit and Hindi texts translated into English; I've also taught, for example, Spanish novels and poetry translated into English. There have been very productive instances in class where students have asked me how two translations differ from each other. And I've had to do my research, go back to the original, and explain that sometimes the original harbours a pun, other times the two translators work through completely different vantage points… Q. How does your research of women's representation in Marathi Bhakti traditions affect your understanding of women characters in Sanskrit and Western texts? A. Long before I formally began working on Bhakti, I've always been interested in gender and subjectivity. My work on Bhakti fed into that already existing interest and what I learnt is that religion, gender and poetry coincide in a very peculiar fashion and one is actually able to see the nascent moment of what we understand as ―modern‖ subjectivity. Subjectivities are those deeply multidisciplinary nerve centres that we just have to struggle with, if we want to study literature in a productive manner. Q. How does the coming up of terms like feminism, queer theory and post colonialism affect the reading of texts written way before these terms were coined? A. I think we've come a very long way because when I was a student I remember being told that there is a problem with looking at Milton through a feminist lens because feminism wasn't around when he lived and wrote. I was told that if one reads race into Othello, that's a terrible misreading. But I know that literary studies, as a discipline, has evolved over the last couple of decades and there is no going back at all. The rise of these terms marks the political transition our field is going through, and we have to embrace those transitions rather than being resistant to them.
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