Anjali Nerlekar – Part 1

Impactful Educator and Author

Play episode

Hosted by

Melwyn Abraham

About Anjali Nerlekar

Impactful Educator and Author

Anjali Nerlekar is an Associate Professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Language and Literatures. She has authored the book, Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2016; Speaking Tiger, 2017). She has co-edited a special double issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing (“The Worlds of Bombay Poetry,” Spring 2017) and is co-editing a forthcoming special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, along with Francesca Orsini, on “Postcolonial Archives.”

Her other publications and research include work on multilingualism and literature, Indo-Caribbean and Postcolonial literature, and comparative Indian and postcolonial modernisms. Her ongoing project (in collaboration with Dr. Bronwen Bledsoe at Cornell University South Asia collections) is the archive of multilingual post-1960 Bombay poetry at Cornell University titled “The Bombay Poets Archive.”

About this Episode

This is part 1 of a 2 part conversation with an exceptional educator. In this episode, we get a glimpse into Anjali’s past and Melwyn’s experience as being one of her students, way back when. They talk about the impact she had on him and her other students and the life lessons she imparted to them. Listen out for why Anjali decided to take her students to see the movie “Grease” and the idea that became the ‘Symbi Trekking Club’.

Tune in for an interesting discussion as well as an introduction to her book, Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture.

“My mother, she had such a passion all her life for reading, for education, something that she did not get in her life that she made sure that her kids, my brother and I will focus precisely on that.”
Anjali Nerlekar

“Definitely, everything I do, I think is inflected by the history of my mother and her philosophy, right? So, I mean my feminist ideas, my political philosophy, my focus on education, everything comes from her.”

– Anjali Nerlekar

Show highlights

“The trekking club is a very big part of my teaching experience, my teaching, the teaching philosophy I got from there, right? So, it’s definitely there but I think I get a lot of energy, I thrived from my interactions with students.”

Anjali Nerlekar

“One of the things I strongly believe in has worked for me. In my classes, when the students bond amongst themselves and they created community amongst themselves, they learn better.”
Anjali Nerlekar