About 

Udaya Kumar studied English Literature at the University of Kerala, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Oxford. He received his doctoral degree from Oxford in 1988 for his thesis on the textual and conceptual dimensions of repetition in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. He has taught in English Literature Departments at the University of Poona and Delhi University, and was Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Kumar retired as Professor from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2025. He has held Fellowships and visiting positions at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Nantes Institute of Advanced Study, Newcastle University, and Kerala Council for Historical Research. 

Kumar’s research and teaching explore literary texts and genres in their relationship with other forms of public expression and thought. His publications on literary fiction have sought to understand aspects of modern subjectivity and cultural history through the study of narrative voice, memory and affect. Writings from modern Kerala have been a major object of enquiry in his work. In addition to the study of literary forms and texts in Malayalam, Kumar has been interested in the history of concepts, and in the relations between public speech and affective force. His recent research has focused on death and contemporary culture, affect and political expression, and idioms of vernacular social thought.

  His publications include Writing the First Person: Literature, History and Autobiography in Modern Kerala (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016), The Joycean Labyrinth: Repetition, Time and Tradition in ‘Ulysses’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), and papers in journals and edited volumes in English and Malayalam. He is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled Literary Remembrance: Realism, Effective Histories and the Social Domain in Fiction from Kerala and a collection of essays in Malayalam, Vakkum Veerum (Speech and Force).  

Research 

Udaya Kumar’s doctoral research studied the work of repetition in Joyce’s Ulysses, focusing on its effects on the experience of meaning, time and tradition. His subsequent research turned to Kerala, India, to examine transformations in ways of writing about the self in late nineteenth and early twentieth century through genres such as anti-caste spiritual and metaphysical texts, monologic poetry, early novels and autobiographical texts. Alongside this, Kumar has been engaged in studies in Malayalam fiction from the middle decades of the twentieth century to the present, focusing on developments in the narrativization of experiences of subjectivity, community and history. Textures of realism, variations in narrative voice, and the uses of fiction for documenting suppressed histories, are key concerns in these studies. 

A second strand of Kumar’s research has been preoccupied with idioms of public writing in Kerala in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing in particular on seemingly ‘minor’ genres such as petition writing, scandal journalism, polemical writing, political oratory, and interventions in community historiography. These studies try to understand the nature of social thought in the vernacular mode and its relationship with conceptual and professional registers. This work has led to an ongoing engagement with the history of concepts in modern Malayalam.  

Kumar’s recent research is also invested in the changing relations between death and contemporary political imaginaries. He is interested in the prominence of death, practices of mourning or commemoration, and intense expressions of grief, rage, resoluteness and destitution in the language of political resistance. This work draws on autobiographical writing, literary fiction, and forms of expression such as slogans that are closely aligned to political practice.

Publications 

Books:

Writing the First Person: Literature, History and Autobiography in Modern Kerala. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, in association with Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 2016. 

The Joycean Labyrinth: Repetition, Time and Tradition in `Ulysses’.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, October 1991, rpt. 2001.

Papers: 

‘Destitute Recollection: Joyce’s Translocations,’ in Transnationalism and Irish Literature, ed. Cóilín Parsons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 65-81.

‘Contemporary Malayalam Fiction and Kerala’s Unaccommodated Pasts,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Indian Literatures, eds. Ulka Anjaria and Anjali Narlekar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 66-79. 

“Utterance Forms and Political Life: Preliminary Notes on the Prayer and the Curse,” Language and Culture: Essays in Honour of Franson Manjali, ed. Saitya Brata Das (New Delhi: Aakaar Books, 2024), pp. 22-43. 

‘Translation and Variation: Literary Studies, Reading Practices and the Vernacular,’ in From Canon to Covid: Transforming English Literary Studies in India, eds. Angelie Multani, Swati Pal, Nandini Saha, Albeena Shakil and Arjun Ghosh (Delhi: Routledge, 2022), pp. 143-55.

‘The Taming of the Public Sphere’, Postcolonial Studies, March 2021. French translation by Isabelle Bruno: « La domestication de la sphère publique », Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances, 16 :1 (2022). Édition électronique : https://journals.openedition.org/rac/25563 

‘Life, Resistance and Resignation: Testimonial Lessons of Dispossession,’ in Displacement and Citizenship: Histories and Memories of Exclusion, eds. Vijaya Rao, Shambhavi Prakash, Mallarika Sinha Roy, and Papori Bora (New Delhi: Tulika Press, 2020), pp. 1-20. 

‘The Perfect Imperfect: Democracy and the Ethics of Self-ruination,” Cultural Critique, 105 (2019), pp. 223-39.

‘Sovereignty, Allegory and Political Affect: K. Narayana Kurukkal’s Novels,’ in Novel Formations: The Indian Beginnings of a European Genre, eds. Baidik Bhattacharya and Sambudha Sen (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2018), pp. 167-210. 

‘The Legibility of Things: Objects and Public Histories in N. S. Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery,’ in Narratology and Ideology: Encounters between Narrative Theory and Postcolonial Criticism, eds. Divya Dwivedi, Henrik Skov Nielsen & Richard Walsh (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2018), pp. 74-90. 

‘Choosing a Tongue, Choosing a Form: Kamala Das’s Bilingual Algorithms,’ in Rosella Ciocca and Neelam Srivastava, eds., Indian Literature and the World: Multilingualism, Translation and the Public Sphere (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 

‘Ambivalences of Publicity: Transparency and Exposure in K. Ramakrishna Pillai’s Writings,’ The Public Sphere from Outside the West, eds. V. Sanil and Divya Dwivedi (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 79-96. 

‘Dr. Palpu’s Petition Writings and Kerala’s Pasts,’ NMML Occasional Papers, History and Society, n.s. No. 59 (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 2014), 39 pp. 

‘Sree Narayana Guru’s Idioms of the Spiritual and the Worldly,’ in Devotion and Dissent, ed. Vijaya Ramaswamy (Delhi: Foundation Books, 2014), pp. 370-79. 

‘Freedom’s Work,’ Foreword to Nikhil Govind, Between Love and Freedom: The Revolutionary in the Hindi Novel (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), pp. vii-xvi. 

‘Consciousness, Agency and Humiliation: Reflections on Dalit Life Writing and Subalternity,’ in The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B. R. Ambedkar, ed. Cosimo Zene (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 158-70. 

‘The Strange Homeliness of the Night: Spectral Speech and the Dalit Present in C. Ayyappan’s Writings,’ Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, XVII: 1 and 2 (2010, pub. 2013) pp. 177-91. 

‘The Primacy of Criticism: Kuttikrishna Marar and the Normative Frames of Realism,’ The South Asian Review, special issue on South Asian Realisms and Post-realisms, vol. 32, no. 1 (2012), pp. 153-72. 

‘Kant on the Sublime: The Subject and the Question of Difference’, in Grounding Morality: Freedom, Knowledge and the Plurality of Cultures, eds. Jyotirmaya Sharma and Raghurama Raju (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), pp. 88-109. 

‘Shaping a Literary Space: Early Literary Histories in Malayalam and Normative Uses of the Past’, in Literature and Nationalist Ideology: Writing Histories of Modern Indian Languages, ed. Hans Harder (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2010), pp. 19-50. 

‘Two Figures of Shame: Exposure, Ethics and Self-Narration’, Études Anglaises: Revue du monde Anglophone 62: 3 (July-September 2009), pp. 345-57. 

‘Writing the Life of the Guru: Chattampi Swamikal, Narayana Guru, and Modes of Biographical Construction’, in Biography as History: Indian Perspectives, ed. Vijaya Ramaswamy and Yogesh Sharma (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswann, 2009), pp. 53-87. 

‘Autobiography as a Way of Writing History: Personal Narratives from Kerala and the Inhabitation of Modernity’, in History in the Vernacular, eds. Partha Chatterjee and Raziuddin Aquil (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008), pp. 418-48. 

‘Subjects of New Lives: Reform, Self-making and the Discourse of Autobiography in Kerala’, in Different Types of History, ed. Bharati Ray (New Delhi: Pearson, 2008), pp. 299- 331. 

‘Representation and Testimony: Anand’s Novels and the Problem of Justice’, in Justice: Political, Social, Juridical, eds. Rajeev Bhargava, Michael Dusche, and Helmut Reifeld (New Delhi: Sage, 2008), pp. 169-200. 

‘The Public, the State and New Domains of Writing: On Ramakrishna Pillai’s Conception of Literary and Political Expression’, Tapasam: A Quarterly Journal of Kerala Studies, 2: 3 & 4 (January and April 2007), pp. 413-41. 

‘Paul Zachariah and the Miracles of a Modern World’, in Cross-Currents in the Modern Short Story, eds. Sucheta Mukherji and Aditi Dasgupta (Calcutta: Loretto College, 2005), pp. 74-85. 

‘The Ethics of Witnessing: Vaikom Muhammad Basheer and the Subject of Historical Narration’, in Narrating India: The Novel in Search of a Nation, ed. E. V. Ramakrishnan (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2005), pp. 305-28. 

‘Literature and Intensity: Deleuze’s Stuttering Machine’, in Trajectory of French Thought (New Delhi: Rupa and FIRC, 2004), pp. 123-35. 

‘Seeing and Reading: Some Questions of Visibility in the Early Malayalam Novel’, in Early Novels in India, ed. Meenakshi Mukherjee (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2002), pp. 161-92. 

‘Two Figures of Desire: Discourses of the Body in Malayalam Literature’, in Translating Desire: The Politics of Gender and Culture in India, ed. Brinda Bose (New Delhi: Katha, 2002), pp. 132-44. 

‘The Temporality of Gesture: Understanding Benjamin’s Writings on Brecht’, in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modernity, eds. Sudha P. Pandya and Prafulla C. Kar (Delhi: Pencraft International, 2001), pp. 139-54. 

‘Anand and the Poetics of Incompleteness’, an Afterword to Anand, Vyasa and Vighneswara, tr. Saji Mathew (New Delhi: Katha, 2000), pp. 135-57. 

‘Basheer’s Humble Historian’, in Many Indias, Many Literatures, ed. Shormishtha Panja (Delhi: Worldview, 1999), pp. 158-70. 

‘Self, Body and Inner Sense: Some Observations on Sree Narayana Guru and Kumaran Asan’, Studies in History, vol. 13, no. 2 (July-December 1997), pp. 247-70. Reprinted in The Indian Postcolonial, eds. Elleka Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 214-37. 

‘Bakhtin and Questions of Autobiographical Consummation’, in Literary Theory: Indian and Western, ed. Prafulla C. Kar (New Delhi: Pencraft International, 1996), pp. 148-65. 

Forthcoming: 

Books: 

Literary Remembrance: Effective Histories in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction from Kerala. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.

Vakkum Veerum (Speech and Force) Pathanamthitta: Prasakthi Books. 

Papers: 

‘Documenting the Self,’ in Knowledge/Nation, eds. Baidik Bhattacharya and Prathama Banerjee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026). 

‘Homeless Intensities: Notes on Narration and the Image in Subararekha,’ in Ritwik Ghatak: Occasional Essays for a 100th Birthday, eds. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Surya Parekh (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2026). 

‘Feeling and Documentation: Kamala Das’s Languages,’ in My Story: Fifty Years, ed. Meena T. Pillai (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2026). 

‘Ramanujan’s Question: On Vernacular Styles of Thinking,’ in Are There Indian Ways of Thinking?, ed. Jyotirmaya Sharma (New Delhi: Primus, 2027). 

Teaching Modules 

Over three decades, Udaya Kumar has taught several courses in MA, MPhil and PhD programmes in literary studies. They include: 

• courses on literary texts, genres and movements, including ‘What is Literature?’, ‘The Novel in English,’ ‘The Novel and Contemporary Forms of Power,’ ‘Life Writing: History and Forms,’ ‘Autobiography and Questions of the Self,’ and ‘Romanticism: Ideas and Contexts’; 
• courses on literary criticism and theory, e.g. ‘Foundations of Aesthetic Theory,’ ‘Texts in Literary Criticism,’ ‘The Work of Narrative,’ and ‘The Idea of the Critique’; and 
• interdisciplinary courses such as ‘Rethinking Culture and Power,’ ‘Cultures of the Body,’ ‘The Idea of the Public: Issues and Debates,’ ‘Death and Contemporary Culture,’ ‘Selfhood and Discourses: India since the 1920s,’ and ‘Narration, Emotions and Ethics.’