JHI Undergraduate Fellow
A&S English and Linguistics (double major)
Supervisor: Urvashi Chakravarty, UTSC English
Zoltan Simo Undergraduate Award in the Humanities
Freya Abbas is a fourth year undergraduate student pursuing a double major in English and linguistics at the University of Toronto’s St. George campus. She is interested in Indigenous, postcolonial, and world literatures as well as analyzing literature through an ecocritical lens. She hopes to go to graduate school to study South Asian literature. Her main hobby is creative writing, and she enjoys the genres of historical fiction and fantasy. Freya is the lead writer of the online youth publication INKspire and was also the recipient of the city of Richmond Hill’s youth artist award in 2019 for creative writing.
Fellowship Project—The Depiction of Labour in Dalit Women’s Literature
Though much of Indian society has been built on the labour of Dalits, this labour is not valued. Very few works of Dalit literature have been translated into English. An exception to this is The Grip of Change, a self-translation by P. Sivakami of her Tamil novel. This translation presents anopportunity to do a close-reading to examine the interconnected themes of the exploitation of labour, land and women. The narrator Gowri recognizes the importance of addressing the interconnectedness between these issues when it comes to effective political resistance. The work can be analyzed through ecocritical and feminist lenses.