Devika Panikar
δάσκαλος (dáskalos) means the teacher in Greek. Devika Panikar has been teaching English Language and Literature since 2006. She is an Assistant Professor with the Directorate of Collegiate Education under the Government of Kerala. She teaches at the Government Colleges under this directorate and is now posted at the Government Law College, Thiruvananthapuram. This website is a collection of lecture notes she prepared by referencing various sources for her students’ perusal. It has been compiled here for the sake of future generations.
Passive Voice in Action
Active sentences are about what people (or things) do, while passive sentences are about what happens to people (or things). In academic writing, it is generally preferred to choose an active verb and...
Woman as Protagonist and Victim
Silence! The Court is in Session is the first of Vijay Tendulkar’s plays to become part of the New Indian Drama phenomenon of the sixties and the first significant modern Indian play in any language t...
I Can’t Help Blossoming
Dr K Ayyappa Panikar is one of the pioneers of modernism in Malayalam poetry. In his poem, I Can’t Help Blossoming he speaks about the importance of having the contentment of accomplishing one’s own l...
Active and Passive
Voice refers to the form of a verb that indicates when a subject performs the action or is the receiver of the action. Active voice means that a sentence has a subject that acts upon its verb. Passive...
Tagore as a Poet
An outstanding poet, a legend of prose, and a perfect philosopher, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore is the greatest of the Indians to write in English. His fine writings, popularly described as 'magical ...
The Song of the Road
Pather Panchali, a vibrant ballad that begins with joy and ends in determination, chronicles the glorious discoveries along the path of everyday life- from spots for secret picnics and the flavour o...
Speech Sounds
A language can be used in two ways for communication. It can be spoken or written. In most fields of study, language is thought of principally in terms of the written word, for it is in this form that...