Jonathan Koshy Varghese, an Associate Researcher at CSH, will be participating as a speaker at the English Colloquium Series, on Reading the Littoral: Towards a Theoretical Framework for Indian Ocean Studies on Wednesday, 30 September 2026 at 1:30 PM IST. The event is organise by the English Department of Ashoka University.

Abstract: Indian Ocean Studies has long proposed a departure from terrestrial epistemologies toward oceanic ones. This has entailed displacing land-bound chronologies of empire and nation in favour of the sea as an organising category of historical and cultural analysis. This lecture takes up this argument to trace how the littoral (and volatile) threshold might serve as method as much as geography. Two strands of my own research anchor this lecture.
Chavittu Nadakam, a theatrical tradition sustained by the Latin Catholic communities of Cochin, organises the lecture’s first part. Its choreography and dramaturgy, I argue, encode a practice of claim-making particular to communities whose livelihoods remain entangled with tidal and environmental rhythm, rendering performance itself a site of oceanic method. The second part turns to T. D. Ramakrishnan’s Malayalam novel Francis Itty Cora, whose narrative form I read as an instrument through which fiction unsettles the omissions of terrestrial historiography. That is to say, a novelistic form recovers what land bound archives have left unrecorded.

Placed alongside one another, performance and prose emerge as parallel modes of oceanic knowing, each capable of narrating precarity and resistance beyond the reach of official record. The lecture thus offers these case studies as a theoretical contribution to making sense of Indian Ocean Studies’ adaptation into an epistemological method.