- Category:
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NALSAR in Dialogue
- Where:
- Class Room No. 11, NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad
- When:
- 23 September, 2026
- Organised By:
- NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad
About the Speaker
Meena Kandasamy is a poet, writer, translator and activist. Her work focuses on caste, gender, linguistic identity, and has been translated into over 20 languages. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010). From 2001 to 2002, she edited The Dalit, a bi-monthly alternative English magazine of the Dalit Media Network. Her novel When I Hit You was nominated for the Women’s Prize in Fiction in 2018. Her most recent work, Fieldwork as a Sex Object, was published in 2026.
Excerpts from the Talk
This edition of NALSAR in Dialogue was moderated by Nandini Biswas, Assistant Professor of Law at NALSAR. The discussion unpacked how a global culture war intersects with the complexities of Indian society. Ms. Kandasamy spoke about how the manosphere infuses traditional gender roles rooted in localized systems of religion, region and most importantly, caste.
She recounted her own experience of abuse in response to her writings and political positions, and how caste influences the language of abuse deployed by trolls online. Ms. Kandasamy also sounded a cautionary note against the proliferation of AI-generated deepfakes on the internet. She pointed out the alarming lack of guardrails against such content due to which even leading social media platforms saw the widespread abuse of AI by the manosphere.
