Vivek V. Narayan

Vivek Narayan is a theatre director, playwright, and performance scholar, whose research is on caste and anti-caste politics in south India. His dissertation, “Stolen Fire: Caste Scripts and Repurposed Universals in South India, 1893-2018,” views Kerala in the colonial period as well as in contemporary times through a performative lens to develop a framework of caste as performance. In addition to a Ph.D. in Theater and Performance Studies, he is pursuing a Ph.D. Minor in Anthropology. He is an alumnus of Royal Holloway, University of London, where he completed MA Theatre Direction on a Charles Wallace India Trust Award. His theatre work has been staged in India, the UK, and the US.

Dissertation: Stolen Fire: Caste Scripts and Repurposed Universals in South India, 1893-2018

Narayan's dissertation, Stolen Fire: Caste Scripts and Repurposed Universals in South India, 1893-2018, interrogates the conceptual and experiential aspects of caste and performance to arrive at a framework that can analyze the social construction and political contestation of caste. He traces transnational routes of humanistic and radical ideas—stolen fires—that disrupt the caste order and empower anti-caste resistance. He focuses on Kerala during the colonial period as well as contemporary postcolonial times through a hybrid methodological lens that includes archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis in order to trace the continuities and ruptures in the ongoing conflict between the caste order and anti-caste resistance.