Mangai / V. Padma

A. Mangai is the pseudonym of Dr. Padma Venkataraman is a Chennai-based scholar and theatre practitioner. She teaches English at Stella Maris College, Chennai, India. As an academic, she has taught English literature, theatre and performing studies at various colleges and universities across India. Besides regularly contributing to regional, national and international journals and magazines.

As a scholar, she has written on Tamil theatre, theatre history, cultural history and a range of other subjects. She has written, directed and performed in various plays with her group “Marupacchi”. She intitated steps to found of She was a founder-member of “Chennai Kalai Kuzhu”(1984), one of India’s most important street theatre groups.

Mangai has published a collection of essays on women in Tamil literature and theatre (2001), and is the translator for Our Lives, Our Words (2011), a collection of first-person accounts by members of the transgender “Hijra” communities around the state of Tamil Nadu.

She also translated “Theri Gatha, a canonical Pali text of Elder Nuns’ Verses into Tamil (2007). Her recent monograph, Acting Up: Gender and Theatre in India (2015) is the first critical work of its kind to be published in English. She has co-edited, with Tapan Basu and Indranil Acharya, also a collection of writings by Dalit authors titled Listen to the Flames: Texts and Readings From the Margins(2016). Mangai also translates fiction and nonfiction from Tamil into English, and vice versa.

She has twice been a recipient of Fulbright Fellowships to work on theatre and gender. She taught the course Drama from “Other” Worlds (King Alfreds College, Winchester, 1999 and 2000). Owing a 2009 Rockefeller-Bellagio Residency, she worked on her monograph on gender and theatre in India.

Link for her Interview: https://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/theatre/Voice-of-the-Woman/article16877456.ece