Ms. Janani Comar is a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the Department of Religion. Her research is at the intersection of religion, caste, and performance. She is particularly interested in the way mythological narratives engage in ethical discourses. Her dissertation looks at hagiographies of mythic figures in colonial South India, and she traces the circulation of their narratives through print and performance. At University of Toronto, she holds the Connaught International Doctoral Scholarship and was a recipient of the MITACS Research Training Award in 2020. She has presented her research at several conferences, including the annual South Asia Conference held at University of Wisconsin Madison.
For the Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Comar aims to revisit the history of modern Hinduism to explore how religion and ethics are intimately linked to social status in the colonial period. Working with scholars at the French Institute of Pondicherry, she is focusing on the writings of subaltern Tamil-speaking communities and explore how these groups participated in lively ethical debates through performance. She is also accessing a wide range of archival sources, including from contemporary performers, to trace how narratives about virtuous figures circulated in rural and urban areas. Her findings will be an integral part of her doctoral dissertation on Tamil literature and performance.