Life writing is an ensemble of life-telling practices that endeavours to recognise, record, recount and report human life as event, text and paradigm. It is a recording of personal memories, experiences, opinions, and emotions, Life writing has repeatedly warranted attention to its discursiveness, often demanding a critical concord between the discipline and the concept. Recent scholarly initiatives have demanded a rigorous reconfiguration of the individual as the tell-tale subject of a life narrative. South Asian lives and their renderings have contributed in particular to this reorganisation by registering a significant deviance of recwhing life in collectives rather than as individuals. The conceptual oeuvre of Life writing has ever since expanded to include the mythical, religious and the performative into its schemata, besides auto/biographies, memoirs, diaries, testimonies and digital lives. South Asian life writing engages consciously with the diverse and complex practices of constructing the ‘auto/biographical’ in the cultural polity of South Asia and seeks to explore and understand the ideation of life and its assumed forms of telling. 

Courses offered

  • Technologies of Self: Writing Lives, Making History
  • Writing Lives Performing Gender

Open Source Materials

This Syllabus is brought to you for free and open access



Research Guidance MPhil

  • Karthika Priyadarshini.V – A Journey through the Recollected Self: A Study of Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou
  • Manju M. Kumar – Constructing the Self:The Autobiographies of Kamala Das and Meena Alexander
  • Vanidevi V.V – Tracing Roots/ Routes: An Ethno-autobiographic study of Viramma: Life of a Dalit















Books