Prof. Pramod Nayar, the head of the Department of English at the School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad, received the Visitor’s Award for Best Research in the Humanities, Art and Social Sciences category for the year 2018 on Wednesday. The award was presented to him by President Ram Nath Kovind at the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi.
“It feels good to receive an award on behalf of the Humanities, a field frequently-ignored in today’s academic world,” said the recipient of the prestigious research award, which carries a citation and prize money of Rs 1 lakh.
Prof. Nayar said that in the past, his awards had taken the form of letters from students and young faculty members from across the country, writing to tell him that they had found his work useful, or inspirational. “If the books I write and the work I do illuminates a corner in my readers’ minds, and they acknowledge it, that is award enough. Though it may sound like I am simultaneously deflating and romanticising the award that I have just received, that is not the case. I just believe that the work we do must be gauged by its primary intended audience — students and the scholarly community,” he said.
Prof. Nayar has been a recipient of Academic Fellowships such as the Smuts Fellowship at Cambridge, and the Fulbright Scholarship at Cornell.
He was honoured with the Visitor’s Award specifically for his research on poetry, memoirs and fiction for the underprivileged. He has also been studying genocide, caste or race-based oppression, war, and human rights campaigns, from a literary-cultural perspective.
“The study of human rights is just not the task of political scientists and politicians alone, but of literary-cultural scholars as well, because victims produce narratives and construct ideas of the human subject — and these are topics of study for literary scholars who are looking to understand the very idea of being human.”
With the prize money of Rs 1 lakh, the professor intends to buy more books that will help him in his research.
He said that he would love to do more work on human rights in the future. “I have diverse interests, including posthumanism, graphic novels and colonial India. I produce work in all these areas, and I hope to continue doing so,” he said.
