Prof. Sashikanth Ananthachari

Prof. Sashikanth is a filmmaker who has been researching these traditions for the last fifteen years. His film ‘Kelai Draupadai’ [Listen Draupadi] was awarded the Best Foreign Film at the DIY Film Festival in Los Angeles in 2016. The film was also the official selection at the prestigious BlowUp Chicago International Arthouse Film Festival in 2016

Prof. Rajesh Kumar

IIT Madras

Prof. Rajesh Kumar is a professor of linguistics in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. He obtained his PhD in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining IIT Madras, he taught at IIT Kanpur and IIT Patna in India and at the University of Texas at Austin in the USA. He has been a visiting faculty at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai in India. His book on Syntax of Negation and Licensing of Negative Polarity Items was published by Routledge in their prestigious series Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics in 2006. He has been associate editor of the journal Language and Language Teaching. He has been part of the language teaching program at all the institutions he has been affiliated with. The broad goal of his research is uncovering regularities underlying both the structural form (what language is) and sociolinguistic functions (what language does) of natural language. He works on structure of South Asian Languages. He is keenly interested in issues related to language (multilingualism) in education; politics; human cognition; and landscape.

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5268-3080

URL: https://hss.iitm.ac.in/team-members/rajesh-kumar/

NOC: Performance Traditions of the Mahabharata in Tamil Nadu, IIT Madras