Brandeis India Fellows 2022-2023
The Brandeis-India Fellows Program offers limited funding for the development of creative projects aimed at building ties between Brandeis University and Indian alumni, partners and organizations.
In June 2023, the Brandeis-India Fellows Program selected one fellow to represent Brandeis in India during summer 2023. Below you will find a description of the Fellow's project.
Brandeis-India Fellow
PhD Student in Anthropology
Gowthaman will be conducting interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Nochipatti, his ancestral village, in order to further develop an autoethnographic performance piece that he has created. The piece, entitled "Performing Archiving Thathamma (Grandmother)," entails the use of performance to recover his grandmother in the archive.
This project started in 2021, in the contemporary anthropological theory class at Brandeis with Professor Elizabeth Ferry, where he was provoked by the idea that "[his] grandmother theorized all the time." It was difficult to prove this hunch as his grandmother, a dalit woman, is silenced in dominant archives, and he could only speculate on her theorization.