Rukmini Bhaya Nair

RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR is Head of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Linguistics and English at IIT Delhi. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1982 and is internationally recognized for her work in the areas of linguistics, cognition and literary theory. In 2006, Nair received a second honoris causa doctoral degree from the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Visiting Professor at the Department of English, Stanford University, in 2005-2006, Nair has taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the National University of Singapore and the University of Washington at Seattle. She has delivered plenary addresses and done readings and invited lectures at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla and over twenty foreign universities from Aarhus and Berkeley to Toronto and Xinxiang.

Nair, who has been called 'the first significant post-modern poet in Indian English' has published three books of poetry: The Hyoid Bone and The Ayodhya Cantos and Yellow Hibiscus (Penguin, 1992, 1999, 2004). She is now working on a fourth volume – Shataka - inspired by the work of the Sanskrit grammarian-poet, Bhartrhari. In 1990, Nair received the first prize in the All India Poetry Society/ British Council competition and 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), in Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (2002) and special issues of Poetry International (2004) and Fulcrum (2006). Her poetry has also been translated into German, Swedish and Macedonian amongst other European languages, as well as into Bengali and Hindi.

The year 2000 saw Nair selected as a 'Face of the Millennium' in a national survey of writers by India Today. 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, she has been the recipient of several other awards (The J.N. Tata Scholarship, the Hornby and Charles Wallace Awards, the Dorothy Leet Grant, etc). Her latest award was a CRASSH fellowship (Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences) at the University of Cambridge in 2006.

Academic books by Nair include Technobrat: Culture in a Cybernetic Classroom (Harper Collins, 1997); Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture (Oxford University Press and Routledge, London and New York, 2003); Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: the Idea of Indifference (Minnesota University Press and Oxford University Press, India, 2002); as well as an edited volume, Translation, Text and Theory: the Paradigm of India (Sage, 2002). Nair serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Literary Semantics (De Gruyter: Berlin & New York), The Journal of Multicultural Discourses (Multilingual Matters: London and Beijing); The Journal of Pragmatics (Elseiver: Amsterdam); Psychology & Social Practice (an e-journal) and The Macmillan Essential Dictionary.

As the editor of Biblio, an Indian literary and cultural journal that the author William Dalrymple has said ‘compares in many ways favorably with the TLS and THES’, she is part of the Australian ABC Radio’s panel of experts for its well-known program ‘The Book Show’. In addition, she contributes to major national dailies and magazines and is a frequent panellist on Mark Tully's BBC broadcast 'Something Understood'. Forthcoming works in 2009 comprise a monograph on Salman Rushdie, a book of essays called Poetry in a Time of Terror and a pair of first-time novels entitled Mad Girl’s Love Song and Attachments.

Nair's writings, both creative and critical, are taught on courses at universities such as Chicago, Delhi, the Open Univ. UK, Toronto and Washington. Indeed, she contends that she writes poetry for the same reason that she does research in cognitive linguistics - to discover the pleasures and pitfalls of language. Her great ambition is simply to continue to write and research, whatever the genre and the odds. Married, with two children, she lives in Delhi.