Manju Jaidka

Manju Jaidka
Born	1953 (age 61–62) Haryana, India
Residence	Chandigarh, India
Nationality	Indian
Occupation	Professor
Employer	Panjab University

Manju Jaidka is a Professor of English at the Panjab University, Chandigarh, in India. She is regarded as a leading Indian academic, best known for her contribution to Twentieth-Century English and American Poetry, American Studies in India, and World Literatures. She is the author of critical books regarded as standard texts in the field and considers her teaching job as her most important work. One of her main concerns is to forge an international network of like-minded academics for the exchange of scholarship, a task she has been successfully engaged in over the last two decades.

Jaidka is also the Chairperson of the Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi. In this capacity she has made a tremendous contribution towards the promotion of literature and culture in Chandigarh.

Biography

Born in Hathwala, a small village in Karnal District, Haryana, to Bhim Sain and Padma Tyagi, Manju Jaidka spent much of her childhood in Ambala where she studied in Convent of Jesus and Mary. Later, she moved with her parents to Secunderabad and finished High School from St. Anne's. For her graduation she enrolled in Govt. College for Women, Chandigarh, and her postgraduation and doctoral degrees were obtained from Panjab University's Department of English. Jaidka lives in Chandigarh with her husband, Vickram Jaidka. They had a son called Raghav (Raju) born in 1977, a special child who passed away in November 2014. <http://manjujaidka.blogspot.in/2008/11/another-milestone-for-raju.html> and <http://manjujaidka.blogspot.in/2014/12/goodbye-raju.html>. The two have two daughters, Bulbul and Kokil.

One of Jaidka's noteworthy achievements is the establishment of a leading academic organisation in India which began as the India Chapter of the US-based MELUS, the Society for the Study of the Multi-ethnic Literature of the United States, and later expanded into MELOW, the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the World. This Society, which comprises about three hundred teachers and scholars from across India, is run with the help of her colleagues at the English Department, Panjab University, Professor Anil Raina, and others.

Books

Academic:

"Deepa Mehta’s Elemental Trilogy". New Delhi: Readworthy Press, July 2011. http://books.google.co.in/books/about/A_Critical_Study_of_Deepa_Mehta_s_Trilog.html?id=n_x1dnrUwmsC&redir_esc=y
"Landmarks in American Literature". New Delhi:Prestige Press, 2007. http://www.easternbookcorporation.com/moreinfo.php?txt_searchstring=13708
Politics of Location in the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the Americas, co-edited with Anil Raina (Chandigarh: Arun Publishing House, 2003).
Text Book entitled An Annotated Anthology of English and American Poetry for MA (University Grants Commission Text Book Award). Chandigarh: Panjab University Publication Bureau, 2002.
Cross-Cultural Transactions in Multi-Ethnic Literatures of America, eds. Anil Raina, Manju Jaidka, Somdatta Mandal and Vijay Kumar Sharma. New Delhi:Prestige Press, 2002
From Slant to Straight: Recent Trends in Women's Poetry. New Delhi: Prestige Publishers, 2000.
T. S. Eliot's Use of Popular Sources (Mellen Press, US, 1997). This was her Post-Doctoral Fulbright project for which research was carried out at the Houghton (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA), Beinecke (Yale), Harry Ramson Centre (Austin, Texas), and New York Public Library.
Tiresias and Other Masks: English and American Poetry after The Waste Land. Chandigarh: Arun Publishing House, 1994.
Confession and Beyond: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Chandigarh: Arun Publishing House, 1992.

Creative Writing

Novel: Amaltas Avenue. Delhi: Lifi Publishers 2014.
Poetry collection: "For Reasons Unknown". Allahabad: Cyberwit, 2013. http://www.amazon.com/For-Reasons-Unknown-Manju-Jaidka/dp/8182533619
Novel: Scandal Pont. Chandigarh: Rupa Publications Oct 2011

Spots of Time* Novel: Spots of Time: A Novel. Chandigarh: Graphit India Oct 2007. http://www.readworthypub.com/index.php?p=sr&Uc=978-93-82363-6-4 January 2013

Play: The Seduction and Betrayal of Cat Whiskers: An Academic Satire. Chandigarh: Graphit India Oct 2007.

SPOTS OF TIME: This is a novel published in October 2007, REPTD 2013. Spots of Time, interspersed with a sprinkling of verse,
traces the interweaving stories of these two women, moving back and forth in time, progressing
through flashbacks and reminiscences. Tangential characters emerge from the margins, come to the
foreground with their own stories, and then recede. As the story unfolds, the various pieces of the
collage are linked together by the narratorial consciousness that observes, assimilates and records
a myriad different experiences, ranging from professional hazards in an academic environment to more
agonising issues of parenting a special child while coping with personal aspirations and ambitions.

The narratology is metafictional; the master narrative holds together several embedded little
stories and yet is a coherent whole, inlaid with literary allusions, traversing an extensive
terrain, from a tiny colony of the City Beautiful nestling in the Shivalik foothills to far-off
places across vast oceanic distances. More information is available on Jaidka's blog.

The Seduction and Betrayal of Cat Whiskers

This is a play – an academic satire that winds in and out through the corridors of an institution of
higher learning, uses the comic lens to look at some of the flaws in the academia. What happens, for
instance, behind the scenes in a major university? Who are the power brokers? What are the politics
that operate in the system and at what different levels? How are appointments and promotions made?
Is there any fair-play or justice? These are some of the questions raised in this play. It would not
be an exaggeration to say that the problems highlighted here are found on almost all campuses, in
India and abroad.

The aim is not to target all academics, universities and colleges as corrupt but to take a peek at
their not-so-pleasant side which, with a little effort and commitment, may be cured if we have the
will to do so. More information is available on Jaidka's blog.

Scandal Point

1892, colonial India. The handsome young Maharaja of Patiala angers the British rulers. His crime?
He has fallen in love and eloped with the Viceroy's daughter. Not an ordinary romance, the elopement
of 1892 has far-reaching consequences. It results in a child who grows up unaware of his lineage but
one day, like Oedipus, he discovers the truth and embarks on a journey seeking his roots. There are
no records, no documents, no witnesses, no evidence. Only stray bits of information and semi-reliable
clues with the help of which he pieces together the almost incredible tale of his mother's elopement
and its tragic aftermath. 

Set amidst the swishing cedars of Shimla and the grandeur of Patiala, this is the story of star-crossed
hearts wrenched apart by history. More information is available on the publisher's page and across
various news articles.

AMALTAS AVENUE: A novel set in contemporary India, Amaltas Avenue focuses on a specific time and place in the lives of three main characters who share a common milieu and seem to drift through ordinary, humdrum lives which cross and intersect occasionally. The façade of complacence is, however, shattered when unexpected developments take place, and radical upheavals threaten to change the course of their lives. What begins as a seemingly innocuous week in a hot and languid summer is soon transformed into an unprecedented and unforgettable sequence of events, marking a turning point in individual lives, a before and an after. Taking as its central episode a real-life academic fraud in North India that made big news in the mid-eighties, the novel fictionalises the event and focuses on a scapegoat who gets unwittingly and inextricably trapped in the vicious tentacles of the case. As he grapples with his private demons, spending hours gazing vacantly at Brueghel’s painting depicting the fall of Icarus, the world around him continues its normal pace, with its orchestrated music echoing ironically in the background. The novel experiments with metafiction: it is part epistolary, following the blog-diary of one of the characters and part heterodiegetic, narrated from an external point of view. The story that unravels traces a gamut of emotions, from love and passion to despair, sorrow and loneliness, finally culminating in a sagacious acceptance of reality with its many hues. A funny-sad novel, Amaltas Avenue underscores the fact that human beings are far from perfect. Being part of a flawed world, they either succumb to the system or else pick up the ropes and learn to survive.

Research projects

Jaidka wrote her doctoral dissertation on the poetry of Sylvia Plath in 1981 and since then has been engaged in several postdoctoral research projects. Among other subjects, she has worked on twentieth-century British and American Poetry, Diasporic Writing from India, Narratives and Narratology, and Contemporary World Literature. She has also supervised several M.Phil. and PhD dissertations.

International Awards/Honours/Distinctions

Recent:

April 2010 and April 2012: Visiting Professor, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
March – April 2008, Jaidka was awarded the Lillian Robinson Fellowship by the Simone de Beauvoir Institute for Feminist Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. http://wsdb.concordia.ca/faculty-and-staff/lillian-robinson-scholars/documents/PreviousLillianRobinsonScholars_002.pdf

Her earlier international engagements are listed here:

Nov – Dec 2006: Visiting Academic, Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University, UK.
2005–07: Member, Executive Council of the International American Studies Association (IASA).
1998–99: International Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation, at the International Forum for US Studies, University of Iowa.
1996, April–May: Fellowship, Salzburg Seminar Workshop on “Themes in Contemporary American Literature" (April 1996) sponsored by USIA, Washington.
1995, September–October: Resident Fellowship, Bellagio Study and Conference Center (sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation), Italy.
1991–92: Post-Doctoral Fulbright Research Grant, Harvard and Yale Universities, US.
Manju Jaidka is on the Editorial Boards of international journals published in the US and UK.

Awards/Distinctions/Positions held in India

June 2008 onward: Chairperson of Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi.
1998– to date: Chief functionary of MELUS-India (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, India Chapter) and MELOW (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the World).
1998–2000: Member, board of directors, American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad.
1996–98: Member, board of directors and Executive Committee of ASRC, Hyderabad.
1994: University Grants Commission Text Book Award.
1991, March: Olive I. Reddick (Sr.) Award for the best literature paper presented at the annual conference of the Indian Association for American Studies, Bombay.
1989, August: William Mulder Research Grant from ASRC, Hyderabad.

Invited talks

Jaidka has been an invited plenary/ keynote speaker at numerous conferences, in India and abroad.

International speaking engagements:

Jaidka has most recently delivered a public lecture in the following institutions in UK: University of Leicester, Leeds, Birmingham, Nottingham; in Canada, at Concordia University, Montreal.
In the United States she has visited University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the University of California in November 2007 and lectured at Fresno, Irvine, Riverside and Cupertino. In April 2006 she attended a conference at Ann Arbor and also lectured at University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, and Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA. In 2004 she was a resource person at the American Studies Institute at Dartmouth. She has also delivered invited lectures at SUNY Buffalo, University of Pennsylvania, University of Vermont, University of Miami, University of Pittsburgh, University of Chicago, Loyola University Chicago, University of Cincinnati, Denver, Boulder – CO, MIT – Boston, University of Louisville (Kentucky), Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), and University of Iowa (US);
In UK has delivered lectures at Oxford, Birmingham, Nottingham Trent, Northampton, London, and Colchester
In Europe at Heidelberg (Germany), Salzburg (Austria), Bellagio (Italy); and at Dhaka in Bangladesh.
She has also presented papers at international conferences like the ALA, NEMLA, MLA and the PCA.

References / See also

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