Kota Neelima

Kota Neelima is an Indian author, columnist, artist and political commentator,^[1] specialising in farmer issues, gender, politics and electoral reforms and seeks to demarcate deficit in India. Her work focuses on condition of women farmers, farmer suicides and peripheries of democratic societies. She writes for The Huffington Post India,^[2] DailyO^[3], DNA^[4], News18 India.^[5], Economic and Political Weekly, and NDTV. National Award winning filmmaker Vetrimaaran has optioned one of her books, Shoes of The Dead, to be adapted into a movie.^[6] As an author she participates at many leading literary festivals like Jaipur Literary Festival,^[7] Dehradun Literature Festival and Delhi Literary Festival. Recently, she faced threats from the Karni Sena^[8] in Rajasthan for writing an article critical of their protest against the movie, Padmavat. Her initiative 'StudioAdda' organises frequent discussions in Delhi on the state of political affairs in India.

Early life

She was born to veteran journalist and author, K V S Rama Sarma and Uma Sarma in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh.^[9] She has a Doctorate in Political Science from University of Delhi, and a Master of Arts in International Relations from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Neelima has also been a Senior Research Fellow, South Asia Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC.

As a journalist, she covered politics for The Indian Express in Delhi and was the political editor of The Sunday Guardian. She has authored academic articles on widows of farmer suicide victims in Vidarbha, 'Right to Recall' reform, and Electoral reforms in India.

Author

She has written books on the poor and women in India in both genres of fiction and non-fiction. Her non-fiction work about farmer suicides identify new areas of distress, especially among the rural poor. Her new book 'Widows of Vidarbha, Making of Shadows' (2018) is about the life of widows who are left behind by suicides of farmers due to agriculture distress in Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. The book reveals the six invisibilities imposed on the women, and how they are forced to relegate their rights and freedoms to the men.

Neelima has utilised the genre of fiction to contract the lives of poor farmers with the lives of the powerful who live in the cities of India. 'Shoes of the Dead' (2013) is the comparision of the inheritances of two young men, a political heir and a poor farmer in India, and who wins the game for power. The book's examines how the poor farmers' determination to get justice for the farmer suicide of his brother, threatens to derail the political career of an ambition politician.

'Death of a moneylender' (2009/Reprint 2016) is the story of a young, urban journalist whose reluctance to cover rural India is a comment on the priorities of mainstream media today. This book was taught, as part curriculum, to the Upper School students of the Collegiate School, Richmond, USA^[10] to learn about rural Indian life and agriculture in a changing world of globalisation.

Her fourth book, 'The Honest Season' (2016) is about six conversations that take place in a mythical Parliament, and establishes why the Indian democracy can afford to ignore the needs of a vast majority of the country.

Her non-fiction works also include two books on spirituality. One of them, Tirupati: A Guide to Life has been translated to Hindi, Telugu and Tamil languages.

Painter

She is a well known painter and her works are impressionist-abstract and the medium in oil on canvas. Neelima follows an elaborate process of making the works, which begins with extensive research of texts, followed by charcoal drawings on paper before, finally converting them to oil paintings. Her works are informed by the rich tradition of skepticism in the Indian philosophical thought,and seek to re-imagine Upanishadic questions to themes of causation, creation and karma. The symbols used in the paintings are trees, sky, the moon and birds, which undergo multi-faceted and complex redefinition.

Neelima's lastest work (2018), Metaphors of the Moon,^[11] charts the trajectories of the mind as it travels from absence to presence in an eternal cycle. The mind is the metaphor for the Moon. It represents the cyclic process of thought; its creation, immersion and regeneration, and also is a metaphor for absence and presence.

Her works have been featured at the Lalit Kala Akademi and the India Habitat Centre in Delhi, and in art shows in Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, among other cities in India.^[12] Her works have also been featured at international exhibitions in China and Belgium.

See also

• List of Indian writers
• List of Indian women writers
• List of Indian women artists

References