Browsing by Author "Shekhawat, Sushila"

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Cinematic Exploration of the Changed Realities in the Projection of Gender Specific Roles
(JLSS, 2013) Shekhawat, Sushila
Cinema dexterously explores and experiments with the myriad portrayals of women which is diversely rich; they are represented as submissive and oppressed on one hand and educated, open-minded, strong-willed on the other. However, there is a continuous change with respect to the stereotyped image and its depiction. The present paper attempts to highlight not only the different images of women but also the changed perception of the society that has exquisitely been captured in the films made in the recent context.
A Comparative Study of Identity Formation and Selection of Choice in Recent Women Writings
(Adhyayan Publishers and Distributors, 2015) Shekhawat, Sushila
Contemporary Hindi Films: A Tool for Women Empowerment
(EJSS, 2019) Shekhawat, Sushila
Innumerable shades of women have found representation in various media formats such as television, print media, social media, internet, cinema etc. Fight for equality and more prominently human rights has been taken up by several prominent film makers to bring this pertinent issue to the limelight so as to enlighten the masses by exposing the actual story of women being involved. This paper tries to study depiction of women in selected Indian Films to better explore their role in shaping up new perspectives on gender equality playing a significant role in sensitizing people towards the reality associated with the issues. The study would also try to look at the different projections and filmic images which have dared to go beyond the conventional portrayal and created a new identity of the empowered women with examples from films like Fire, Pink, Gulaab gang, Kahaani, etc.
Cultural Value and Questions of Morality: The Bollywood Biopic in Philip Drummond
(The London Symposium, 2018-01) Shekhawat, Sushila
QUESTIONS OF CULTURAL VALUE brings together 30 compact and highly readable essays from around the world based on research presented at FILM & MEDIA 2016: The Fifth Annual London Film & Media Conference. Established and emerging scholars from 16 countries offer fascinating analytic and critical perspectives on a wide range of international films, TV, and digital media. Part 1: National Identities; Part 2: The American Dream; Part 3: Film & Television in India; Part 4: Media Moralities; Part 5: Masculinities; Part 6: Femininities; Part 7: The Audiovisual Fairy Tale; Part 8: Generic Paradigms; Part 9: Media Ontologies; Part 10: Engaging Audiences. The London Symposium 2017 / ISBN 978-0-9573631-7-5 / Kindle e-book (Print Replica) / 373 pages / fully bookmarked and searchable. Contributors: Tamara Barreiro Neira, Gauri Durga Chakraborty, Ana Dosen, Phillip Drummond, Pablo Echart, Chioma Deborah Ekhaeyemhe, Marina Gabelica, Emily Oghale God'spresence, Kristina Graour, Ruchika Gurung, Indre Jakucione, Sigrun Lehnert, Saravanan Mani, Gillian McIver, Mariana Medeiros Seixas & Frederic Gimello-Mesplomb, Nandabalan Panneerselvam, Raffaele Pavoni, Carlos & Javier Rabasso, Stuart Richards, Andrea Rinke, Wajiha Raza Rizvi, Antonio Sanchez-Escalonilla, Frank Scheide, Mona Sinha, Lela Tsiphuria, Angela Tumini & Malin Isaksson, Pauliina Tuomi, Neerja Vyas & Sushila Shekhawat, Alison Wilde & Stephen Millett, Jani Wilson.
Desertscapes in the global south and beyond anthropocene naturecultures
(Taylor & Francis, 2024) Shekhawat, Sushila
Embracing a rich diversity of voices, this volume seeks to explore the different facets of Anthropocene naturecultures in the desert biomes of the Global South and beyond. Essays in this collection will articulate issues of desertification, indigeneity and re-inhabitation in narratives that thread together Tibet, China, Australia, India, South Mexico, South Africa and Brazil in all their richness and complexity. Re-imaging the desert figure’s rich biodiversity, this book presents new ways to envision the human relationships to natural ecology and mindful accountability, tracing complex narrative connections and challenging hegemonic norms of its role in the co-construction of identity, affect, and gender. Essays also aim to engage in an intertextual conversation with colonial genres that influence the popular conception of these spaces, moving beyond the usual tropes to forge a topographically informed desert identity and posit a ‘natureculture’ ecosystem based on the interpenetration of landscape, culture, and history. This volume includes literary exploration of environmental injustices, analyzing motifs of deforestation, land degradation, falling crop production, toxic man-made chemicals, and extractivist practices linked to various social and economic stressors and gradients in economic and political power. This diverse volume will provide a significant contribution to desert humanities from the Global South, responding to the pressing problems of the Anthropocene and employing place-based ecocritical frameworks that help us imagine a sustainable way of life.
Developing Communication Competence in Students Through Face-to-Face Conversation
(SSRN, 2019-08) Shekhawat, Sushila; Nirban, Virendra Singh
The present paper discusses the strategies to develop the communication competence of the students through face-to-face conversation. It has taken up the case of Birla Institute of Technology and Science, one of the premier institutes in India, and has limited itself to the course on Business Communication offered to the students of engineering and sciences as an elective. It discusses an approach to teaching a significant communication component of face-to-face conversation and the skills acquired by the students during such situations.
Enhancing Employability Skills of Engineering Graduates
(Springer, 2020-07) Shekhawat, Sushila
Engineering education demands numerous challenges in the present context due to the difficulties posed by the placement scenario. Demand for competent engineering professionals has made the selection process highly challenging giving rise to a need for comprehensive education pedagogy not just confined to inculcating hard core technical attributes but also human skills. Hence there is an urgent need to continuously upgrade the curriculum design of engineering courses so as to better equip the technical graduates with employability skills. BITS, Pilani, one of the premiere technical institutes in India has a well-designed pool of structured courses such as Business Communication, Technical communication, etc. which do incorporate modules such as Professional Presentations, Group Discussions, Interviews, etc. so as to hone the soft skills of the students. The paper attempts to deal with the experiential innovative methodology adopted in the course Business communication so as to enhance the employability skills of the Engineering students.
Feministic Undertones in Rabindranath Tagore's/86 Punishment, Vision and Garibala
(Literary Voice, 2016) Shekhawat, Sushila
As a writer of short stories, Rabindranath Tagore ranks among the great short story writers of the world like Guy De Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekov. He raised the Bengali short stories to the status of an independent literary form. Credited with introducing colloquial speech into Bengali literature, his short stories are fine works of art immensely valuable due to realistic depiction of rural and urban Bengal. However, these stories are by no means confined to the limits of time and space of Bengal at a particular period and have a universal appeal. The themes of Tagore's short stories mostly revolve around the problems of joint family system, family clashes, social criticism in a wider sense, love; passionate or placid, outside marriage ties born out of conjugal bond and love in its waywardness and eccentricities. Moreover his stories often focus on the struggles of women in a traditional Indian society and many of them are concerned with marital relationships and the various forms and issues of conflict between husband and wife
Inculcating Life Skills among College Students through Films
(IUP, 2020-09) Sharma, Sangeeta; Shekhawat, Sushila
The present job scenario demands aspiring professionals to be highly focused and targeted in the area of their work, expecting them to be proficient in their one-to-one dealings with their peers, superiors and subordinates. It requires them to be highly skilled in this technology-driven world, demanding them to be proficient in life skills such as interpersonal, leadership, time management, negotiation, critical thinking and problem solving, which would enable them to deliver the best in their personal and professional life. One of the effective methodologies to develop life skills among the college students is through storytelling. Cinema has proven to be a successful medium to develop and sustain life skills among university students. As said by Syed Sultan Ahmed who uses cinema to teach life skills to students, “A lot of knowledge in the past was acquired from books. But today, we live in a world where a lot of content is relayed by the audio-visual media. It is the only medium that children can relate to and are naturally drawn to them”.1 The paper attempts to explore the concept of life skills as understood and experienced by university students as part of their course structure. It deals with the concept of inculcating life skills among university students with a special emphasis on the case study of students at BITS, Pilani through certain specific course modules. This paper specifically focuses on the observations of the course Short Film and Video Production, and the findings show a substantial difference in their understanding and practical implication through the course modules selected as a part of course assignments.
India In-Between: Culture and Nation Representation in Jean Renoir’s Film the River (1951)
(Taylor & Francis, 2020-10) Shekhawat, Sushila
The above conversation from Jean Renoir’sFootnote1 film, The River, based on Rumer Godden’s 1946 book of the same name, is jarringly symbolic of the identity formation of India as a colonized nation. History, as documentation of past experiences and narratives, has predominantly existed in the form of written texts. Historical documents, journals and newspaper articles have elaborately discussed India under the colonial rule and during partition. The post-colonial experiences have also manifested itself in biographies, autobiographies and even in works of fiction such as that of Manto and Chughtai, to name a few. But with the advent of technology in the form of a camera, history and narration have found a novel way to manifest itself not just as written words but also as images. Further on, these still images have evolved into motion pictures. “In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” Bazin argues that photography and cinema are discoveries that finally satisfy the obsession with realism… The photographic image is a mechanical reproduction of reality and we therefore accept as real the object reproduced or re-presented”.Footnote2 Set in the banks of the river Ganges in West Bengal, Renoir’s cinematography establishes the topography as the mise en scène while the camera captures daily activities of human lives in a realistic manner. Faulkner in The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir writes:Footnote3
Indigenous women as agents of environmental change: a study of selected Indian ecodocumentaries
(Taylor & Francis, 2024-01) Shekhawat, Sushila
Mainstream feminism has always revolved around the experiences of white women and has failed to acknowledge the plight of indigenous women who were subjugated to both patriarchy and colonialism. A gendered notion of indigeneity is necessary to bring the marginalization of Indigenous women to the forefront to ensure tribal sovereignty. Indigenous women’s activism has always been distinctly connected to the environment in order to protect the community from external agencies such as companies and government bodies. Several grassroot environmental movements have emerged from the indigenous communities where women have played a pivotal role in the success of these movements. Thus, this study focuses on the environmentalism of indigenous women by analyzing selected documentaries from India i.e. Missing: Forgotten Women in India’s Climate Action Plans (2015), The Seed Guardians (2016), Agar Wo Desh Banati (2018) and Thengapalli (2020). The paper aims to recognize the struggles of these women to achieve basic environmental rights and how they promote sustainable living with the help of their traditional knowledge. Indigenous feminism will not simply be taken as a matter of identity politics, rather it will be used as a framework to understand indigenous women’s struggles as a part of a global liberation movement.
Infinite Memory Loop: Trapped in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019) Shekhawat, Sushila
The role of education in research is not just to provide skills that will allow doing research, but also to provide the critical appreciation of how research is to be done. The ideology of this book is constructed on the experienced phenomenon in the contemporary world. Thus, this book is an attempt for critical engagements leading to pragmatic solutions. The perspective of the book is to help readers develop a comprehensive perspective on interdisciplinarity on knowledge, education, and research and not to take an ideological stance. The papers involve cultural variations including varied methodological perspectives having intrinsic originality of multiple disciplines. We hope to present the book to assist the researchers in order to utilize new perspectives offering immense insight to pursue research in the quantitative and qualitative analogy.
Inner Progression of a Repressed Psyche in Anita Desai’s Fasting Feasting
(Atlantic Publishers and Distributors Pvt. Ltd., 2009) Shekhawat, Sushila
As the academic literature is growing, the vibrant field of global analysis is increasing. Shining a light on the pertinent aspects of postcolonial writing, new urges in postcolonial literature, which is an anthology of scholarly articles, brings together emerging critical voices to engage in the major debates within existing postcolonial studies, addressing issues such as hybridization, subaltern voices, decolonization, multicultural and border cultures. The authors critically examine the relevance of postcolonial theoretical perspectives and discuss the issues of empowerment and empowerment; tensions between modernity and tradition; and ideas of development as connected to understandings of race, gender, caste and subalternity. The book engages with the issues raised by contemporary practitioners, and offers a variety of illuminating insights on the fascinating subject of postcolonial studies which will enlighten the students, researchers and teachers of English literature.
Integrating Humanities and Liberal Arts in Engineering Curriculum: Need, Experiences and New Directions
(JSSH, 2013) Shekhawat, Sushila
Engineering curriculum in India, by and large, focuses only on imparting education in the respective technical domain. While such a system has been producing reasonably competitive technocrats, it has not reected much upon the concept of producing well- rounded engineers. An integration of different streams of knowledge- especially liberal arts, humanities and social sciences - in the engineering curriculum would add this missing dimension. Further, the changing contours of an engineer’s profession have made it necessary for one to broaden one’s outlook and to be able to connect with the rest of the disciplines. Educators world over have started recognising the importance of creativity and critical thinking which are an integral part of liberal arts, humanities and social sciences. In the western context, there has been a greater emphasis on including these courses in the engineering curriculum. In the Indian context, very few institutes have made some niche efforts in including humanities components in their course package. And often, courses in communication, technical writing, principles of management etc. are counted as the only components in humanities. It is very rare for Tech schools to either have open electives or compulsory credits in humanities. This article discusses how important it is for us academics in India to look beyond imparting mere technical education and to include courses in the areas of liberal arts, humanities and social sciences.
Learning Soft Skills Through Group Discussion
(SSRN, 2021-04) Sharma, Sangeeta; Shekhawat, Sushila
Group Discussions (GD) are a robust way to teach not only communication skills to the students but also non-verbal communication, difference between assertiveness and aggressiveness, how to be polite, how to put across your points, how to encourage the reticent participants, etc. GD has been an important component of ‘soft skills for professionals’, course offered to second and third year engineering students at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. This paper focuses on the objectives of teaching the theory of GD and highlights the learning outcomes after all the GDs were conducted in the class.
Literary Desertscapes in the Global South and Beyond Anthropocene Naturecultures
(Taylor & Francis, 2023) Shekhawat, Sushila
Embracing a rich diversity of voices, this volume seeks to explore the different facets of Anthropocene naturecultures in the desert biomes of the Global South and beyond. Essays in this collection will articulate issues of desertification, indigeneity and re-inhabitation in narratives that thread together Tibet, China, Australia, India, South Mexico, South Africa and Brazil in all their richness and complexity. Re-imaging the desert figure’s rich biodiversity, this book presents new ways to envision the human relationships to natural ecology and mindful accountability, tracing complex narrative connections and challenging hegemonic norms of its role in the co-construction of identity, affect, and gender. Essays also aim to engage in an intertextual conversation with colonial genres that influence the popular conception of these spaces, moving beyond the usual tropes to forge a topographically informed desert identity and posit a ‘natureculture’ ecosystem based on the interpenetration of landscape, culture, and history. This volume includes literary exploration of environmental injustices, analyzing motifs of deforestation, land degradation, falling crop production, toxic man-made chemicals, and extractivist practices linked to various social and economic stressors and gradients in economic and political power. This diverse volume will provide a significant contribution to desert humanities from the Global South, responding to the pressing problems of the Anthropocene and employing place-based ecocritical frameworks that help us imagine a sustainable way of life.
Mapping the Evolution of Crime Fiction as a Genre: Eighteenth Century to the Contemporary Times
(Rupkatha, 2020) Shekhawat, Sushila
A mystery story which focuses on a crime and the investigation of that crime is commonly understood as a crime fiction narrative. Its ability to excite the readers, challenge their rational abilities and involve them in the gradual unravelling of the mystery is what makes crime fiction a huge success. With innumerable critical works, scholarly study and continued relevance, crime fiction has entered the canon of literature. A genre that closely reflects the socio-political, historical and cultural aspects of the society, it has gradually acquired a significant role both in critiquing the social order and at the same time for documenting history through its gradual evolution and development. This paper attempts to map the evolution of crime fiction from the eighteenth century to the contemporary times. In doing so, the paper aims to study how social changes impact literary traditions. This study also aims to establish the relevance of crime fiction as a literary genre as it evolves into multiple sub-genres, structures itself into specific rules and regulations and metamorphosises into extra-literary forms.
Media, Culture and Ethics
(Macmillan, 2018-01) Sharma, Sangeeta; Shekhawat, Sushila; Yadav, Anupam
Media has become such a prominent source of information today that we just cannot ignore it. Apart from traditional media, the alternate media has occupied a major space in the life of an individual. With the dependence on media for information dissemination, responsibility of being correct is the major concern. Everyone has his/her own prejudices and is guided by whimsical thoughts, so it is imperative to have media literacy to understand the information transferred through any media. Today every individual has the power to generate news through social media. The accuracy of the information is decided by the reader, based on prerequisite information. Media and popular culture percolate in all aspects of our waking time. The unrelenting exposure predominantly guides our perception of reality, The formation of our values, our beliefs and attitudes and above all it defines self and society. This has become an extraordinarily powerful educating agent amongst majority of the population. The speed with which it is influencing the society has blinded us. Hence, it becomes imperative to have complete and true reflection of the cultures in which the stories are set.
Portrayal of Females in Indian English Feminist Fiction and Hindi Parallel Cinema during 1975-2005
(BITS Pilani, 2009) Shekhawat, Sushila
A Procedural's Procedure: The Narrativity of Phyllis Dorothy James White
(Literary Voice, 2022-03) Shekhawat, Sushila
Among sub-genres of crime fiction, police procedurals can be the least adventurous. Yet, it has emerged as one of the most popular forms of crime writing in the twenty first century. From novels to television series, films and web series, the sub-genre is widely explored in both the textual and digital space. The procedural's narrative structure follows the classic detective fiction formula but distinguishes itself through its humane characters, representation of social conditions, and struggles of human psyche and emotions. One such narrative is P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh Series (1962–2008) set in the British space. James uses interrogations, the omniscient narrator and multiplicity of narrative strands within a single story. This paper aims to understand how the police procedural acts as a medium to represent the contemporary society beyond the confines of the genre-structure of crime and investigation