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A collaboration between The Ashoka Centre for Translation and Penguin Random House, Chronicles was introduced in April 2024 as a series of non-fiction translations “aimed at bringing creative-critical textual narratives from various Indian languages to English.” It also seeks to function as a living archive and resource as it gathers voices that might otherwise remain dispersed across India’s linguistic map.

On the 29th and 30th of August, the second edition of Bhashavaad: National Translation Conference took place, organised by the Ashoka Centre for Translation in partnership with the New India Foundation, in an effort to bring scholars, writers, translators and publishers together.

At Ashoka University, Siddhesh Gautam delivers a talk that challenges seventy-five years of cultural apartheid in Indian design education.

Directed by Shazia Iqbal, Dhadak 2 is the Bollywood adaptation of Mari Selvaraj’s well-received Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal (2018).

A reel by a club at Ashoka may just be a few seconds of stimulation in the course of a doom scroll, but the aphorism ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’ holds for a reason—a video, then? Arguably, even more. The seemingly insignificant reel becomes important to us all, for this bite of information plays a vital role in how our institution is perceived. The number of times a friend from another university has sent me a reel from HerCampus or CLAD is, well, countless.

On May 21st, author Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, a collection of twelve short stories, originally written in Kannada and later translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi, won the coveted International Booker Prize, becoming the first ever Kannada book to do so. It came as a rebuke to India’s literary establishment.

Displacement, migration, or even just the act of moving out, was never simply about crossing borders or the unsettling of the familiar that follows, but also the shifting and suppression of desires.

Ashoka’s first choice-driven play, titled ‘Out of Time’ has two meanings. “You are out of time because the period of time is repeating, but you’re also out of time because at the end of the play, one of the two characters passes away, or stops existing in that same plane of existence,” says Aritra Mukhopadhyay (UG2023), the director and writer of the play.

December 6, 1956 marked the loss of Bharat Ratna Dr B.R Ambedkar, lovingly referred to as Babasaheb Ambedkar. Babasaheb died peacefully in his sleep, three days after completing his final manuscript for Buddha and His Dhamma. The Buddhist cremation ceremony at Dadar Chowpatty beach on December 7, 1956, was marked by the presence of half a million grieving people

Indian Ocean performing in Ashoka University | Photo courtesy: Arish Azmat There is something about an Indian Ocean concert that feels...