Sukrita Paul Kumar

Sukrita Paul Kumar (born DOB) is a noted Indian poet, critic, and academician of many years of standing.[1] She has been the recipient of many prestigious grants, as well as national and international fellowships and residencies. Her major research project with the UGC led to the publication of her book Narrating Partition: Texts, Interpretations, Ideas. She is the chief editor of the book entitled Cultural Diversity, Linguistic Plurality and Literary Traditions of India, a textbook prescribed by the University of Delhi for course use in its Honours B.A. programme.[2]

Early life and background

Sukrita Paul Kumar was born in Nairobi,Kenya[3] to Joginder Paul, an educator, well known fiction writer in Urdu, and an English literature teacher and her mother a retired professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia University. Sukrita Paul Kumar had most of her schooling in Kenya. She emigrated to India with her family when Kenya obtained its freedom from the British. She was educated at Zakir Husain College, Hindu College (both University of Delhi, India) and Government College of Arts and Sciences, Marathwada University, India. Her husband is a consultant electronic engineer; they have two grown children. Sukrita Paul Kumar lived in Aurangabad, Maharashtra for a few years before settling down in New Delhi. She is an active cultural and social activist.

Career

Educator

Dr. Kumar has over four decades of teaching experience as an associate professor of graduate and post-graduate courses in English and American literature, as well as Indian literature in translation. She supervises doctoral research on the creative process, partition literature, and gender in literature in India and abroad. She currently holds the Aruna Asaf Ali Chair, University of Delhi and programme coordinator of B.Tech Humanities (under the meta college concept) at the Cluster Innovation Centre, University of Delhi.

Literary

Sukrita's book, The New Story and Conversations on Modernism, published by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla led to a deeper understanding of modernism in post-Partition Hindi and Urdu literature. As Director of a UNESCO project on The Culture of Peace, she edited Mapping Memories, a volume of Urdu short stories from India and Pakistan.[4] Many of Sukrita's poems[5] have emerged from her experience of working with homeless people, tsunami victims, and street children. She has lectured and given readings of her poems at many institutions and universities, seminars, and conferences in India and abroad. Kumar has been on the jury for many literary awards. She held an exhibition of her paintings at AIFACS, New Delhi.

Fellowships/Awards/Grants

Sukrita Paul Kumar has received numerous awards and grants. Among them, most recently, she was awarded the Tagore Fellowship by the Ministry of Culture for a book project on Cultural Diversity in India, in May 2012. In 2009 and 2010, she was awarded two the Grants by International Council of Canadian Studies for projects on managing diversity. In 2010, she was awarded the Grant by Sahitya Akademi for a project on narrating women's lives in Chamba and Bharmou . She was awarded the Visitorship at Concordia University for the designing of a course on Indian Women and their Lives in 2009.[6]

Cultural Activities

Social Activism

In November 2002, Dr. Kumar set up a winter shelter for the homeless in an old, vacant school building and managed it for six months helping 300 homeless men and children. Literacy camps, counselling sessions and awareness workshops on sanitation, hygiene, gender etc. organized for the homeless along with a daily meeting to discuss their problems.

She set up workshops to mobilize college students to participate in the above-mentioned venture to evolve an understanding of the problems of the homeless in Delhi. This was also organized to dispel the common perception that the homeless are criminals and delinquent.

She set up a programme for fund raising to provide the homeless, especially the old, with blankets and shoes. She has also conducted workshops through women's studies programmes at the University of Delhi in slum areas and schools on gender sensitization.

Books

Critical

Edited

IIAS, Shimla, 2002. (Collection of Essays)

(Urdu stories from India and Pakistan translated into English. The same collection of stories in the original Urdu was published as Bazdeed by Katha, New Delhi, 1998

Modern Hindi and Urdu short stories (Translated into English)

Translated

(Translation of Urdu stories into English.)[6]

(A novel translated by Sunil Trivedi and Sukrita Paul Kumar.)

Poems

References

  1. ↑ https://ducic.ac.in/Sukrita-Paul-Kumar-Aruna-Asaf-Chair
  2. ↑ "Confessions of the Multi-lingual". The Hindu. Retrieved 27 September 2016.
  3. ↑ https://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/sukrita-paul-kumar-5715.html
  4. ↑ "SAWNET: Bookshelf: Sukrita Paul Kumar". www.sawnet.org. Retrieved 2016-05-30.
  5. ↑ http://www.kritya.in/04/en/poetry_at_our_time9.html
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 "About Dr. Sukrita Paul Kumar". Cluster Innovation Centre, University of Delhi. Retrieved 27 September 2016.
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