Sumangala Damodaran

 Sumangala Damodaran is an economist who is working in the School of Development Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi (AUD) after teaching at Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi for sixteen years. She has been involved with the cultural protest movement in Delhi from the early nineteen eighties and was part of a protest song group called Parcham from the early eighties to the early nineties in Delhi. Over this period and later as well, she has worked with Safdar Hashmi and his street theatre group Jana Natya Manch, and has also been associated with theatre personalities like Habib Tanvir and Prasanna. She has also, in recent years, been involved with research and teaching in Popular Music Studies and is involved with the setting up of the School of Culture and Creative Expressions at AUD in this capacity. Beginning from an independent research fellowship of Sarai, Centre for Studies in Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, she has been involved in research and documentation of a forgotten musical tradition, that of the Indian People’s Theatre Association, from the 1940s and 1950s and this work is presently being supported by a grant from the National School of Drama, New Delhi. She has lectured on the subject at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, New Delhi, various colleges in Delhi University and at the Centre for India Studies in Africa, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.