The Department of Comparative Literature is delighted to announce that Thirthankar Chakraborty has been awarded a PhD under the supervision of Professor Shane Weller and Dr Thomas Baldwin with a thesis entitled ‘Samuel Beckett and Indian Literature.’
Godot ke Intezar Mein (Hindi), Godor Pratikshay (Bengali), Eppo Varuvaru (Tamil), Kalpo Ke Kalpana Mari Parvari Chhe (Gujarati), Edin Ahibo Teu (Assamese), Su Yee (Kashmiri): these are just some of the translations and adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot into Indian languages. They reveal how Beckett’s chef d’oeuvre has reached every corner of the country, and has gained from the remarkable dissemination through a multilingual, multicultural, social, and political space of post-independence India.
Divided into three parts, Thirthankar’s thesis is a comparative study of the relation between Samuel Beckett’s works and Indian prose fiction, drama, and cinema, from the moment when Beckett’s oeuvre was first introduced in India. Engaging with recent debates on the concept of world literature, it assesses three phases that are pertinent to each of these parts: 1) the topical-planetary phase: Beckett’s influence on Anglo Indian novelists, from Salman Rushdie to Upamanyu Chatterjee; 2) the world-making phase: the circulation of Beckettian themes, techniques and style amongst Indian playwrights, such as Girish Karnad and Badal Sircar; and 3) the canonical phase: Beckett’s pervasive presence rather than direct influence in Indian cinema, from Bollywood to Ashish Avikunthak and the Cinema of Prayoga. Put together, these three parts form a three-phase evolution, and a conceptual framework for the field of world literature. Starting with Rushdie, the thesis charters new territories in the light of Beckett’s works, while the comparative approach draws attention to the heterogeneous and complex nature of modern Indian literature and cinema.
During his PhD, which was funded by a University of Kent 50th Anniversary Scholarship, Thirthankar has presented papers at various conferences, such as at the International Federation for Theatre Research and the British Association for Modernist Studies. Sponsored by the Centre for Modern European Literature, he co-organised the Samuel Beckett and World Literature conference in 2016. He also won the British Centre for Literary Translation bursary for participating at the Institute of World Literature in 2015 and was recipient of the Samuel Beckett Summer School’s international bursary in 2014.
Our congratulations to Dr Chakraborty.
For more details of the PhD in Comparative Literature, please see: https://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/complit/postgraduate/research-comparative-literature.html