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 and now works at the Government College Kasaragod. This website is a collection of lecture notes she prepared by referring to various sources for her students’ perusal.
Kanthapura
Kanthapura is the first novel of Raja Rao. It was written in France thousands of miles away from India and yet it gives a most graphic, vivid and realistic account of the Gandhian freedom struggle in ...
Being Incomplete
Hayavadana, Girish Karnad’s popular play, fulfils our romantic fantasies. A woman aspires to the perfect man, pursuing her dream of being complete. And a man with a horse’s head yearns to be fully hum...
Still I Rise
Maya Angelou’s works often focused on the experience of being a black woman in America. She had to live through some of the worst oppression and inequality for African American people. Although slaver...
History Plays
A history play is a dramatic work where the events of the plot are either partially or entirely drawn from people and events of the past. It is also considered a theatrical genre. William Shakespeare ...
Direct to Indirect
Direct speech is exactly what it sounds like -text that reports the exact thoughts expressed by a person in their original form. It is often enclosed in quotation marks so that the reader understands ...
Mystery Plays
Mystery plays are religious performances based on Biblical stories, such as the Fall of Adam and Eve and the Last Judgement. They were originally performed in churches and then moved out into public s...
Conjunction
A conjunction is a part of speech that is used to connect words, phrases, clauses, or sentences. They can be one word or a few words. They glue words, phrases and clauses together and are made to conv...
Hayavadana
Hayavadana, the play by Girish Karnad, tells the story of two friends who are in love with the same woman and who accidentally swap heads. A comedy ending in tragedy, the narrative also tells the stor...
Types of Phrases
A phrase is one or more words that form a meaningful grammatical unit within a clause. A clause contains a subject and a predicate and in many cases, can be a sentence on its own. In contrast, a phras...
The Kitemaker
Ruskin Bond’s story The Kitemaker presents the differences between the past and present in rural India primarily through the nostalgic recollections of an elderly man. The past differs considerably fr...