Vibha Singh Chauhan

The award of a Small Study and Research grant proved invaluable for me for reasons probably different from many others. I was not a young scholar but a university teacher in mid-career, and had developed a serious academic interest in an area that was not directly related to my formal discipline of English literature. My independent readings in sociology, anthropology and history, along with my travels in the Indian countryside had opened the fresh arena of the creation and continuation of village gods as an intergral part of cultural existence in India. I understood that a lot of solid academic material lay therein. However, I could not launch on a formal study or project because of the inflexibility of our university disciplines. Moreover I also needed a little more confidence in the validity of my ideas. The award did all of these things. It became a testing ground for my ideas and the acceptance of my proposal facilitated my work within my workplace too. It was easier to get leave for travel. The funds were very useful in covering partial expenses for photographs, travel and stay. I was truly staisfied to see my ideas in the form of a written statement. The connection between culture studies (of which my study really forms a part) literature and contemporary social reality is not far-fetched. I made several presentation in seminars and have published work based on my study of the village gods. I have presented my work at the Women's Development Centre, as we as Social Science Seminars at Delhi University. Parts of my survey and the analysis has also been published in the Journal of the Social Science Institute, Delhi. In fact the survey and study cross strict boundaries of disciplines and can be used as a valuable tool to analyse the Indian situation. The perspective that I gained through my travel and study provided me with tools that helped me look at literature anew and became a valuable input for my PhD work. I submitted my PhD thesis in 2001, entitled "Community in Fiction: A study of selected novels in English, Hindi and Bangla" at Jawaharlal Nehru University and it is evident that connections between my survey and my thesis do exist.