Yale-NUS professor wins Aura Estrada Short Story contest

Assistant Professor Parashar Kulkarni and Boston Review’s special arts issue, Speculation. Images provided by Parashar Kulkarni.

Educators, researchers, public intellectuals, popular scholars, and creative story writers – faculty at Yale-NUS College are often accomplished beyond the classroom, and Assistant Professor of Political Science Parashar Kulkarni is no exception. Besides teaching courses such as ‘Comparative Politics’ and ‘Religion and Politics in South Asia’, and publishing academic articles, Dr Kulkarni is also an established short story writer, having previously received several awards such as the British Academy Brian Barry Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Dr Kulkarni’s creative work ‘The Origin of Cow Therapy’ has most recently won the 2022 Aura Estrada Short Story Prize. The contest is organised by the Boston Review, a non-profit political and literary forum based in the United States, created in honour of Aura Estrada, a Mexican writer.

In the story, an asylum cow becomes a support animal to a shell-shocked soldier towards the end of the second World War.

The judge for the competition, Jordy Rosenberg, an author and Professor of English at The University of Massachusetts-Amherst, described the story as a “historical novel tunnelled into the dazzling space of a short story” and “a comedic send-up of psychiatric institutions and the self-important, ceaselessly speculating project of British hegemony”.

“The story is at the intersection of several interests – childhood trauma, colonial value-systems, and violence,” Dr Kulkarni said. ‘I hope that readers find the psychological orientation interesting, he added.

Dr Kulkarni is interested in studying the intersections of culture and politics. He previously published a fiction novel, Cow and Company, about the decline and fall of the British Chewing Gum Company. In the work, he examines the interaction between mercantile capitalism and religion under colonialism.

The Origin of Cow Therapy has been published, in Boston Review’s special arts issue, Speculation. Dr Kulkarni’s work will join a collection of creative poetry, stories, and essays that explore how the speculative imagination can help us build a better world and better understand our past. Renowned and forthcoming writers have contributed pieces on topics such as ethics of the far future, the meaning of land and community in the African diaspora, and alternative worlds to the collection.

Dr Kulkarni also appreciates the contest’s and Boston Review’s emphasis on the creative. “I study politics. It’s a relatively conservative discipline focused on journal articles and book manuscripts. To me, however, form is never self-evident. Should a research project become an article, a documentary, a short story, or a museum exhibit? Yes, social science can be critical and empirical, but it is also creative,” he said.

Dr Kulkarni is working on other projects, such as a novel about the labour movement in colonial Bombay and a documentary on religious idols.