Megha Manjari Mohanty, research scholar at the Department of English, presented a paper at the Culture and the Mind: Voices, Sites and Practices Conference organized by the Center for Culture and the Mind, University of Copenhagen at Copenhagen, Denmark between 16-18th May, 2024.
The paper was titled “Psychiatric Disability and the Indian Mood Memoir: A Study of Shreevatsa Nevatia’s How to Travel Light” and was presented in the panel on “Representing the Mind: Cultural Approaches to Health and Suffering”. The paper looked at what the generic conventions of the mood memoir, specifically memoirs of Bipolar Disorder, look like in the Indian context. The paper demonstrated how the text challenges popular representations of “madness”, while laying claim to other first-person accounts of mental illness. It also argued that the author mobilizes the memoir form to reconstruct his ethos or character by “talking back” to institutions of healthcare.
The trip was fully funded by the Center for Culture and the Mind, University of Copenhagen. Megha Manjari Mohanty is working on memoirs by persons afflicted with bipolar disorder under the supervision of Professor Anna Kurian.