Zana Mody

Thesis title: Landscapes of the Body: Women, Nation, and Imagination post-1947

Supervisor: Professor Pablo Mukherjee

My research looks to examine the relationship between gender and sovereignty in the cultural imaginaries of the postcolonial Indian nation. In tracing how the female body becomes a metonym for the—as yet unrealised—Indian nation in the late nineteenth century, I interrogate the persistence of this ideological trope as it resurfaces within the postcolonial South Asian national imaginary. In turn, I read the 1947 Partition of India as a hinge through which to illuminate the deep-seated contradictions that exist within the spatial and bodily metaphors of Indian nationalism and the gendered violence of Partition and beyond. By assembling both a material (historical) and figurative (literary and visual) genealogy of the gendered imaginaries of postcolonial India, I situate the postcolonial writer, artist and filmmaker as agents who take on the political project of decolonisation by (re)imagining the Indian female body precisely by acknowledging her complex socio-political and cultural origins. 

Research Interests: gender studies; Partition; archive; Indian literature and art; oral histories; visual culture; queer theory; aesthetics; feminist theory; postcolonial feminism