Section 12: Research Proposal Writing

The Three Questions Every Proposal Must Answer:
(1) What? — What exactly will you study? What is the research question?
(2) Why? — Why does this matter? What gap in existing knowledge will you fill?
(3) How? — What theoretical framework and methodology will you use?

A proposal that cannot answer all three clearly and specifically will not succeed, regardless of how impressive the writing is.

Common Mistakes in Research Proposals:
(1) A topic, not a question — "I want to study Dalit literature" is a topic; "How do Dalit autobiographies challenge the epistemological authority of upper-caste literary criticism?" is a researchable question.
(2) No gap identified — the literature review summarises existing work without showing what is missing.
(3) Vague methodology — "I will use a theoretical approach" is not methodology; name the theories, the primary texts, and the analytical procedure.
(4) Over-ambition — a three-year PhD cannot cover all Indian fiction since Independence; focus specifically.
(5) Poor references — citing only Wikipedia or undergraduate textbooks signals inadequate preparation.

Title: The Subaltern Voice and the English Novel: Narrating Caste in Dalit Autobiographies in English (1992–2022)

Introduction
The emergence of Dalit life writing in English over the past three decades constitutes one of the most significant developments in Indian literature in English — not merely as literary production but as an epistemological challenge to the dominant traditions of Indian literary criticism. Texts such as Bama's Karukku (translated into English), Omprakash Valmiki's Joothan, Baby Kamble's The Prisons We Broke, and Sheoraj Singh Bechain's My Life insert into the English literary space experiences, perspectives, and forms of knowledge systematically excluded from both upper-caste Indian fiction in English and the canonical postcolonial literary tradition. This study proposes to examine how Dalit autobiographies written in or translated into English negotiate the formal conventions of Western autobiography and the epistemological demands of Dalit political thought, and what this negotiation reveals about the limits of postcolonial theory as a framework for Dalit literature.

Statement of the Problem
Existing scholarship on Dalit literature in English has focused primarily on its political content — its documentation of caste atrocity, its challenge to Brahminical authority, its relationship to Ambedkarite political philosophy. Less attention has been paid to the formal and generic dimensions of Dalit autobiography in English: how these texts simultaneously use and resist the conventions of Western life writing; how translation mediates the relationship between the vernacular Dalit literary tradition and the English literary marketplace; and how the choice of English as the language of address implicates Dalit writers in the very educational structures that historically excluded them. This study addresses these gaps.

Objectives
1. To analyse how selected Dalit autobiographies in English negotiate the formal conventions of the genre — confession, bildungsroman, testimony, witness narrative.
2. To examine the role of translation in mediating between vernacular Dalit literary traditions and English literary conventions.
3. To assess the adequacy of postcolonial theory (Said, Bhabha, Spivak) as a critical framework for Dalit literature, and to identify where Dalit theory (Ambedkar, Guru, Rege) supplements or challenges it.
4. To argue for a critical framework that accounts for caste as a category distinct from — and not reducible to — colonial race discourse.

Review of Literature
Scholarly work on Dalit literature in English has grown substantially since the 1990s. K. Satyanarayana and Stuart Blackburn's edited volume Dalit Studies (2017) provides a comprehensive overview of the field. Sharmila Rege's Writing Caste, Writing Gender (2006) analyses the gendered dimensions of Dalit autobiography with particular attention to women's writing. G. Aloysius's Nationalism Without a Nation in India (1997) situates Dalit politics within the broader history of Indian nationalism. Gopal Guru's theoretical essays on Dalit epistemology — collected in The Cracked Mirror (2012, with Sundar Sarukkai) — provide the philosophical framework for thinking about Dalit knowledge production. However, the formal and generic dimensions of Dalit autobiography in English, and particularly the role of translation, remain underexplored. Anand Teltumbde and Suraj Yengde's more recent anthologies (The Persistence of Caste, The Radical in Ambedkar) have extended the political analysis but not the literary-formal one. This study fills that gap.

Theoretical Framework
The study will draw on three intersecting theoretical traditions: Dalit epistemology (Guru, Rege, Sarukkai) as the primary framework; postcolonial theory (Spivak's subaltern, Bhabha's hybridity) as a point of critical engagement and, where necessary, departure; and genre theory (Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's autobiography theory, Michael Fischer's ethnic autobiography) as the formal analytical framework. The study will argue that Dalit autobiography demands a theoretical framework that takes caste seriously as a category in its own right — not merely as an Indian variant of race or colonial domination — and that existing postcolonial frameworks are insufficient for this purpose without supplementation from Dalit theory.

Methodology
The study will combine close reading of primary texts with contextual and theoretical analysis. Primary texts will be selected from Dalit autobiographies published in English or in English translation between 1992 (the publication of Bama's Karukku in Tamil) and 2022, covering a range of regional languages, genders, and sub-caste communities. Translation will be treated not as a transparent medium but as itself a site of critical analysis — examining how translators mediate between vernacular and English conventions. Secondary literature in Dalit studies, postcolonial theory, and autobiography theory will provide the critical context.

Significance
The study will make three contributions: first, a sustained formal analysis of Dalit autobiography in English as a distinct genre with its own conventions and challenges; second, a critical engagement with postcolonial theory from a Dalit perspective; and third, a model for reading translation as a theoretical rather than merely technical operation in the study of Indian literature. It responds to the urgent need for critical frameworks adequate to the richness and complexity of Dalit literary production.

Provisional Chapter Outline
Chapter 1: Introduction — Dalit autobiography, postcolonial theory, and the limits of existing frameworks
Chapter 2: Genre and form — how Dalit autobiographies use and resist Western life-writing conventions
Chapter 3: Translation as theory — mediating between vernacular and English Dalit literature
Chapter 4: Caste, gender, and the gendered Dalit voice — women's autobiographies
Chapter 5: Conclusion — toward a critical framework for Dalit literature in English

Key References
Ambedkar, B.R. Annihilation of Caste. 1936.
Bama. Karukku. Trans. Lakshmi Holmstrom. Macmillan, 2000.
Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai. The Cracked Mirror. OUP, 2012.
Rege, Sharmila. Writing Caste, Writing Gender. Zubaan, 2006.
Satyanarayana, K., and Stuart Blackburn, eds. Dalit Studies. Duke UP, 2017.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. U of Minnesota P, 2010.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. U of Illinois P, 1988.
Valmiki, Omprakash. Joothan: An Untouchable's Life. Trans. Arun Prabha Mukherjee. Columbia UP, 2003.

Title: Narrating the Non-Human: Ecocritical Readings of the Sea in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy

Introduction
Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy — Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015) — is among the most ambitious works of historical fiction produced in the postcolonial tradition. Set against the background of the 19th-century opium trade between India and China, the trilogy has been extensively studied for its representation of colonial economic structures, its polyphonic narrative technique, and its reconstruction of the creolised language of the Indian Ocean world. Less attention has been paid to its representation of the sea itself — the Indian Ocean — as a character, a history, and a political force. This proposal argues that the Ibis trilogy demands an ecocritical reading that takes the ocean seriously as an actor in colonial history, not merely a setting for human drama.

Statement of the Problem
Existing scholarship on the Ibis trilogy has been primarily concerned with its historical, political, and linguistic dimensions. While this scholarship is extensive and valuable, it has consistently treated the Indian Ocean as background — as the spatial context for the human drama of colonial trade and violence. This reproduces, ironically, the anthropocentrism that ecocriticism most forcefully challenges. The sea in Ghosh's trilogy is not merely a setting: it is an agent — it shapes the lives, choices, and deaths of the human characters; it carries its own history; it is itself a victim of the colonial extractive economy. This study addresses the gap by bringing ecocritical theory — particularly Blue Humanities and the developing field of "Oceanic Studies" — to bear on the trilogy.

Objectives
1. To analyse how Ghosh's narrative techniques (polyphony, multiple focalisation, hybrid language) construct the Indian Ocean as an active rather than passive presence in the trilogy.
2. To examine the representation of the sea's ecology — its fish, currents, weather systems, and tidal rhythms — in relation to the colonial disruption of these systems.
3. To read the trilogy through the theoretical frameworks of Blue Humanities (Brayton, DeLoughrey) and Rob Nixon's concept of slow violence — asking how colonial extraction constitutes slow environmental violence that the trilogy both represents and partially conceals.
4. To contribute to the emerging field of Indian Ocean literary studies by positioning Ghosh's trilogy within a longer tradition of Indian Ocean writing.

Review of Literature
Scholarship on Ghosh's Ibis trilogy is substantial. Priya Srinivasan's work on the trilogy's linguistic hybridity; Claire Chambers's postcolonial readings; and Elleke Boehmer's analysis of its historical reconstruction are foundational. On ecocriticism and the sea, Steve Mentz's Shipwreck Modernity (2015) and Elizabeth DeLoughrey's Allegories of the Anthropocene (2019) are key theoretical texts. Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) provides the framework for reading colonial extraction as environmental damage. The Blue Humanities — a subset of ecocriticism focused specifically on maritime and oceanic environments — is an emerging field whose application to South Asian literature remains largely undeveloped. This study maps the intersection between the Ibis scholarship and the Blue Humanities precisely.

Theoretical Framework
The study will work across three intersecting theoretical fields: ecocriticism and the Blue Humanities (Mentz, DeLoughrey, Brayton) as the primary framework; Rob Nixon's slow violence theory as the framework for connecting the environmental and the political; and narratology (Genette's polyphony, Bakhtin's heteroglossia) as the formal analytical framework for understanding how the trilogy's narrative technique constructs the ocean's presence. The study will argue that the trilogy's formal innovations — its multiple languages, its shifting focalisers, its refusal of a single narrative authority — are themselves ecocritical in their effect, if not always in their intent.

Methodology
The study combines close reading of the trilogy's primary texts with ecocritical and narratological analysis. Archival research in the history of the Indian Ocean trade — using the records of the East India Company, the opium trade documentation, and the natural history records of the period — will provide the historical context for the literary analysis. The study will also examine Ghosh's own non-fiction writing on climate and the ocean (The Great Derangement, 2016) as a critical framework for reading the fictional trilogy. Comparative readings with other Indian Ocean literary texts (Abdullah Hussein's Émigré Journeys, M.G. Vassanji's The Gunny Sack) will situate the trilogy within a broader literary tradition.

Significance
The study will make three original contributions: first, the first sustained ecocritical reading of the Ibis trilogy as a whole; second, an application of Blue Humanities methodology to South Asian literature, a largely uncharted territory; and third, a theoretical argument for the compatibility of postcolonial and ecocritical frameworks — demonstrating that the colonial and the ecological cannot be separated in the Indian Ocean context, where colonial extraction was also environmental extraction.

Provisional Chapter Outline
Chapter 1: Introduction — Ghosh, the Indian Ocean, and the ecocritical turn
Chapter 2: The sea as character — polyphony, focalisation, and the ocean's presence
Chapter 3: Slow violence on the water — colonial extraction and ecological damage
Chapter 4: Blue Humanities and Indian Ocean literary tradition
Chapter 5: Conclusion — ecocriticism and postcolonialism at sea

Key References
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke UP, 2019.
Ghosh, Amitav. Sea of Poppies. John Murray, 2008; River of Smoke. John Murray, 2011; Flood of Fire. John Murray, 2015.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. U of Chicago P, 2016.
Mentz, Steve. Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization. U of Minnesota P, 2015.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Knopf, 1993.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Harvard UP, 1999.

Title: [Main Title: A Specific Claim or Description] — [Subtitle: The Texts, Period, or Framework]

Introduction (200–300 words)
Begin with a statement of the field and its significance. Narrow to your specific topic. Identify the gap or problem. End with a sentence or two previewing your proposed approach. Avoid starting with a dictionary definition or a vague historical overview — start with what makes your topic interesting and important.

Statement of the Problem / Research Question (100–150 words)
State your research question directly and specifically. Explain what gap in existing knowledge your research will fill. Your question should be arguable (not already settled) and specific enough to be answerable within a three-year PhD.

Objectives (3–5 points)
1. To [verb] [specific aspect of the primary texts or data] in relation to [theoretical framework or historical context].
2. To examine [a second specific aspect].
3. To argue that [your central claim] — connecting the textual analysis to a broader theoretical or historical argument.

Review of Literature (300–400 words)
Discuss 6–10 key scholarly works on your topic. For each, briefly state its argument and its relevance to your research. End by identifying the gap — what these works have not done that your research will do. Do not simply list and summarise; synthesise the scholarship into a coherent picture of what is known and what remains unknown.

Theoretical Framework (150–200 words)
Name the theoretical framework(s) you will use — postcolonial theory, feminist criticism, ecocriticism, narratology, discourse analysis, etc. Identify the key theorists and concepts you will apply. Explain why this framework is appropriate for your research question. If you are combining frameworks, explain how they relate to each other.

Methodology (200–250 words)
Identify your primary texts or data. Explain your analytical procedure — close reading? corpus analysis? archival research? comparative reading? Explain why this method is appropriate for your question. If your research involves empirical data (interviews, surveys, corpora), describe your data collection procedure and ethical considerations.

Significance (100–150 words)
State specifically what your research will contribute — to the study of the texts you examine, to the theoretical framework you use, to the broader field. Avoid vague claims like "this research will be important"; be specific about the contribution.

Provisional Chapter Outline
Chapter 1: Introduction — [topic, gap, argument, methodology overview]
Chapter 2: [First body chapter topic]
Chapter 3: [Second body chapter topic]
Chapter 4: [Third body chapter topic — or fourth if needed]
Chapter 5: Conclusion — [synthesis, contribution, implications]

References (10–20 key sources)
List using MLA or the format required by the university. Include primary texts, key theoretical works, and the most important secondary literature. Every source listed should be one you have actually read.