The 2024 Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship at LAF UWTSD awarded to Niyati Bhat
We were delighted to announce that our CWIT Fellowship in Creative Writing and Translation for spring 2024 was been awarded to Niyati Bhat. The previous fellows were V. Ramaswamy, Mohini Gupta, Maaz bin Bilal, Shalim M. Hussein, Maithreyi Karnoor and Samvartha ‘Sahil’.
Niyati is a writer, translator (Hindi and Kashmiri to English) and editor of Kashmiri Pandit origin from New Delhi, India. She is also a PhD Candidate in Cinema Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her PhD dissertation engages with the cinematic imagination of the Sri Lankan civil war and its aftermath. She holds an MPhil in Cinema Studies and an MA in Arts and Aesthetics (Visual Arts, Theatre & Film Studies) from JNU and a BA (Hons) Mass Media and Mass Communication from IP College for Women, University of Delhi.
Her work has appeared in leading Indian and international publications such as the A Map Called Home (poetry anthology), India Today, The Hindu, Scroll.in, Vogue India, The Established, Outlook Magazine, Asymptote Journal, SummerHill Journal among others. She has presented her work on Kashmiri music and Indian cinema at Harvard University’s Graduate Music Forum, Digital Politics in Millennial India hosted by LMU Germany, Jamia Millia Islamia International Conference 2020 and Association for Asian Studies Conference 2020. Her work has been recognised by a media fellowship at Michael Nagler’s Metta Centre for Non Violence in 2014.
During her 10 week residency she was invited by Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones, Director of CAWCS, to lecture at the Drwm at the National Library of Wales on May 8th 2024 and was welcomed by Kerry Ferguson, Aberystwyth Mayor and Chair of the Dinas Llên consortium, and greeted by Mohini Gupta, CWIT Fellow 2017 and PhD Candidate at University of Oxford.
Niyati’s lecture is entitled “My Memory is Getting in the Way of Your History”. The quote by Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali sums up the contradictory claims of personal memories versus official histories in the context of controversial events such as the Kashmiri Pandit exodus of 1990. In her ‘ancestral memoir’ of women from her family, Niyati interweaves personal history with that of Kashmir in the past two hundred years. You can watch it here:
You can read more about her work at http://niyatibhat.in/
Photo: Rajwant Rawat