In 2021, one of India’s public universities, Delhi University (DU), decided to drop a pertinent Marxist-feminist short story by Mahasweta Devi called "Draupadi'' (2012). This story is a poignant tale of a long-running Maoist insurgency in the 1970s, shown through a woman from the Santhal tribe who fiercely challenges the police officer who raped her, which was one of the only representations of minority voices in the syllabus. Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi” (2012) reimagines the epic figure as Dopdi, a tribal rebel whose brutal treatment is set against the backdrop of the Naxalite movement, exposing state violence and gendered oppression, making the story both politically charged and deeply controversial. As an undergraduate student, when I studied it in class, it was the first time I heard my professor critique, albeit hesitantly, police violence and discuss victim-survivor instincts. The reason given for its removal was that the text was “offensive.” When asked to respond to the parties objecting to the removal of “Draupadi,” DU’s registrar replied, "I can read English, you can read English. If something offensive is written somewhere, we don’t need a Ph.D. in literature to understand that'' (Women's Web 2021).1
This is a common occurrence across the world where decision-makers wield major institutional forces, enabling them to dissolve any intellectual resistance from the faculty. General labels like “offensive” offer a parochial and uncritical understanding of the English discipline. The label of offense is made valuable by turning it into an affective condition that is assumed to be widely understood. As the English discipline seems to be moving into biased hands, how can we reclaim our pedagogy and affirm the intellectual abundance that emerges from reading beyond “offense”? In the spring of 2023, as a graduate student studying in the US, I crafted a digital pedagogical experiment with the digital annotation tool, Doccano, to conduct a close reading with undergraduate and recently graduated students from India which allowed us to center and examine our personal affective conditions in response to the short story (Draupadi). In this paper, I share our pedagogical experiment and propose a method of close reading that asks for an objective emotional judgment where the process of judgment inherent in the reading process urges affective engagements for learning. Using emotions as a common unit of judgment, I will suggest how students’ emotional interpretations of elements labeled as controversial or offensive in texts such as Draupadi can help educators understand how students think and respond to the texts that they read academically.
While educators like Durba Basu write about how using digital asynchronous online tools "evidently made the teaching-learning experience more dialogic [...] provok[ing] the curiosity of students," my project aims to produce a creative way of collaborating with students and documenting their emotional responses that eventually guide their learning curve (Basu 2020, 7). Choosing data visualization as my persuasive tool, I collaborated with five students from India who recently majored in English at the undergraduate level. Each of them had studied English at institutions across the country, offering a diverse perspective for the experiment. They annotated four texts using the online annotation tool doccano, which allows users to annotate text files with tags of different emotions. To present my results, I used Python to color-code labels and create a spectrum of emotional annotations that I refer to affective landmarks. If, as DU’s registrar suggests, reading English inherently involves understanding the offensive, how can we sensitize ourselves through the reading process to move beyond offense? This intricate spectrum of affective landmarks captures the density of reading as a process and visually challenges the idea of reading as a passive activity, as exemplified in the DU oversight committee’s comments. The spectrum views reading aesthetically and evokes qualitative reflection. Affective Landmarking creates space for students to develop emotional literacy alongside textual literacy, promoting a deeper, more personal mode of learning that recognizes the interplay between personal experience, cultural context, and academic interpretation.
My creation of this experiment was also influenced by transactional reading theorist Louise Rosenblatt, who argues that the “aesthetic” mode of reading can give rise to a transactional way of reading, where meaning emerges from a relationship between the reader and the text. In The Reader, the Text, the Poem, Rosenblatt notes that,
the reader's primary purpose is fulfilled during the reading event, as he fixes his attention on the actual experience he is living through. This permits the whole range of responses generated by the text to enter into the center of awareness. Out of these materials, he selects and weaves what he sees as the work of art (Rosenblatt 1978, 27–28).
When reading aesthetically, I first had to figure out the units that were indicative of “aesthetic” value—units that could reflect how emotion, context, and interpretation intersect across individual reading experiences in my experiment. Because my participants were located in different parts of India, with distinct sociocultural and educational backgrounds, I had to account for this contextual diversity in my methodology. The varied backgrounds of the students shaped how I framed the experiment and selected tools that would allow for isolated, personal, and emotionally nuanced engagement with the text.
To decolonize pedagogical studies, I have centered my theoretical understanding of affective education by using concepts from classical India. I use the concept of Rasa (a Sanskrit word that can be loosely translated as flavor) to measure the students’ emotional responses.2 I borrow this term from the ancient Indian Rasa theory to form the basis for understanding what, when, and how students feel when working with academic texts/literature? Rasa theory reframes emotion as central to meaning-making—not just a byproduct of reading, but a critical component of how learning takes place. Building on my understanding of transactional theory, I used Rasa to measure the students' reading experiences. I call my blend of transactional theory and Rasa Affective Landmarking This close reading style encourages readers to consciously categorize their emotions throughout the reading process. My primary purpose is to test Affective Landmarking as a tool to analyze the efficacy of teaching “offensive” or banned texts through a process-based approach. Affective Landmarking is a method enhanced by digital technology that can be applied to measure students’ reading process to any text.
Methodology
The Rasa theory can be traced back to the Natyashastra (written between 200 BCE and 200 CE), an ancient Indian handbook on the performing arts written in Sanskrit by a sage known today as Bharata. Classical Indian aesthetics are used in theatre and poetics to suggest an essential emotion to the spectator. Rasa is a suggestive emotion that is produced after a union of three Bhavas, elements or points of origin of the spectator’s experience: Vibhava (environment), Anubhava (voluntary and involuntary emotional responses of the actors), and Vyabhicaribhava (transient moods that determine the final emotion in the spectator). This trifold build of the Rasa is also parallel to Rosenblatt’s reader/text/poem structure of the transactional theory: the reading experience as environment, the text as emotional responses of actors (or, opposed to a play, in a text, the stylistics of the text can be read as acting elements), and the reader’s aesthetic responses as the transient moods. All these result in a permanent emotion, the Rasa. In this study, I treat Rasa as a concrete interpretive framework which can be applied with consistency and nuance to support close reading practices, especially in relation to controversial or banned texts. As Pravas Chaudhury, in his 1965 article “The Theory of Rasa,” writes, “Rasa itself is not an emotion” but a “suggestion” to the spectator, representing that “poetry is not essentially an imitation of nature which includes life and emotions though nature is depicted in it” (Chaudhury 1965, 2). So, Rasa is a suggestion in the form of an emotion, which I capture using the colors traditionally assigned to the eight Rasas.3 On doccano, students labeled sentences based on this list (see Figure 1). I also assigned the students who participated in my study to read Sheldon Pollock’s “An Intellectual History of Rasa,” after which we discussed and recapped Pollock’s text, and I provided detailed information about using Rasa virtually (Pollock 2016). The students were also provided with a supplementary list of Rasas (see Figure 2). All students read and referred to the supplement at their own pace. Therefore, their isolated reading experiences ensured that their personalized emotional responses remained intact.
| Name of the Rasa | Similar Emotions |
|---|---|
Ultimately, this cross-cultural approach highlights the global potential of Rasa as a framework for the discourse on affective pedagogy.4 Drawing on non-Western epistemologies expands our tools for understanding emotion in the classroom and invites students to engage in emotional meaning-making that transcends individualistic or Eurocentric models. Scholars like Michalinos Zembylas have argued that emotions like “empathy” in education should be nurtured both as personal feelings and as collective and historical experiences that can inform critical, decolonial pedagogy (Zembylas 2018, 213). This dichotomy is how I view Rasa: it is realized by the individual but its implications run beyond the individual. Rasa rejects the subject-object hierarchy by envisioning the processual origins of emotions. Its tripartite origins in environment/characters/stimuli show that it is an inherently unstable category. In other words, my study provides a space for students to “realize” their Rasa, or what I call “objectify their emotions” by putting a label on it. However, the process/space/medium of Affective Landmarking is my most important contribution. Rasa mimics the fleeting quality of affect but when used in the classroom, it offers a medium or open field to students; a shared ground for unstable interpretation using emotion, or, simply put, subjective readership emerges from objectified emotions. The categories of Rasa through the use of Doccano and Python create an opportunity to visualize or “landmark” the process of emotional reading instead of standardizing how students are expected to read; this digital methodology helps us understand how they actually read and feel their way through a text.
Close Readings with Doccano
We primarily studied four short texts from the University Grants Commission standardized curriculum, including texts deemed controversial. They are Mahasweta Devi’s 1978 short story “Draupadi” in the paper on Women’s Writing,5 Sylvia Plath’s 1962 poem “Daddy” (in the paper on Women’s Writing), Shashi Deshpande’s 1993 short story “The Intrusion” (in the paper on Indian Writing in English) and Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (in the paper on Women’s Writing) (Delhi University 2019; University Grants Commission 2015). Each of these texts contain themes of social importance that might have been considered “offensive” at one point in history. Though the controversy for “Draupadi” led to its removal, there is alignment between each text and controversy in the other three texts, descriptions of harm and genocide, marital rape, and female hysteria.
Further, to reveal the diversity of reading styles to academics and the general public, I visualized the annotations into a color spectrum, a bite-sized version of affective reading experiences. Using Python, each annotated version of the text was visualized into a color spectrum. Then, I created a key for the reader to easily identify the emotions and their locations in the spectrum (see Figure 3). The visual products I created for my project were 20 sub-spectrums—4 spectrums for each of the five students. The result is a spectrum showing five different ways one text can be read. I chose this kind of visualization because it helps describe, by showing the diversity of emotional responses, how student responses go well beyond the limits of “offense,” as marked by academic bureaucrats. The students’ emotional responses will be compared with the understanding of a single label of “offense” as a state usually associated with the emotions of anger, disgust, or shame. The label of an “offensive text” and the Affective Landmarking spectrum are both bite-sized representations (“offense” as an ideological label; the spectrum as a visual representation) of the text. This project will contribute to the debate on curricular changes by asking: Which of these two representations is a more authentic reading?
To ensure democratic collaboration, I interviewed students about their post-annotation experience.6 To maintain anonymity, they were assigned the following pseudonyms: Chetna, Neeraj, Umi, Sachin, and Hayat. Though most of my interpretation of the spectrums was based on student annotations, the interviews helped answer or validate the patterns in which students read the texts.7
Results
Reading the Spectrums
There are four visual results (see Figures 4, 5, 6, 7) but in this article, I will closely read the spectrum of reading “Draupadi” to suggest one way of interpreting Affective Landmarking. In my reading, I will read joy, wonder, love, and heroism as positive emotions, and fear, anger, disgust, and sadness as negative emotions. I do not devalue these emotions but instead read their causes and justifications. For instance, reading “disgust” as Sara Ahmed does in The Cultural Politics of Emotion: “To be disgusted is after all to be affected by what one has rejected” (Ahmed 2014, 10). In my analysis of student annotations, I will pair “controversial” elements with emotional responses and student interviews (measuring intent) to develop Affective Landmarking.
While the annotation tool allowed students to label emotional reactions in real time, it could not fully capture the context, intent, or interpretive complexity behind those labels. Interviews offered a dialogic and reflective space for students to articulate why they felt a certain way about specific passages, helping to ground the emotional data in lived experience. This mixed-methods approach—combining digital annotation with qualitative interviews—was essential to ensuring that students’ affective responses were not only recorded but meaningfully understood within their social and educational contexts.
The five students who agreed to participate in this project, albeit a small number,8 came from diverse backgrounds. Chetna came from a metropolitan city in India and had a privileged academic background. Neeraj’s family legacy goes back to a village in Bihar, and to him, his background was, in his words, a “mystery for the longest time” (Neeraj 2023). Umi grew up in New Delhi, primarily interacting with its Muslim community.9 Sachin, a former student from Pondicherry, indicated that he had experienced multiple chronic illnesses for three years, and they affected the way he read and perceived academia in general. Even though he studied English literature for six years, it was only when he went through health issues that he related to the experiences of characters that he had not in the past. Finally, Hayat’s middle-class Muslim Kashmiri identity influenced both her research and her work; she is especially conscious of her own female identity in the politically disputed territory.10 She believes that the largely patriarchal and orthodox Kashmiri Society and her witnessing of gender-based violence affects the way she reads literature. I mention these details about the backgrounds of the participants in my study because of the saturation of author-focused biographical studies in literary criticism today. I wish to shift the conversation to reader-specific biography, the lived experience of the reader, to aid our understanding of syllabus formation and learning within the classroom.
Mahashweta Devi’s “Draupadi”
Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Draupadi” (2012) takes a spin on the famous ideal feminine character, Draupadi, from the Hindu epic Mahabharat by naming the protagonist of her story in a tribalized dialect— Dopdi.11 The reason why “Draupadi” stirs up controversy is two-fold: the implicit political taboos against discussing the Naxalite or Left Wing Extremism (LWE) Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the radical actions of the characters in the story that further indicate the violence of the movement. Devi sets her story in a village, focusing on two opposing characters: rebel tribal woman Dopdi and Senanayak, the left-wing political figure working for the government. The reason many readers consider the text offensive is not just because it describes Naxal violence but also because it describes Dopdi’s capture and gang rape. Senanayak orders his soldiers to gang rape local Naxal Dopdi in an attempt to “make her” (Devi 2012, 401).
News articles published right after "Draupadi" was removed from Delhi University’s B.A.(Hons.) in English syllabus on 26 August 2021 note the rationale provided by official sources. On the one hand, DU’s Registrar, Vikas Gupta, recognized the consequences of talking about police brutality in the classroom. He wrote: “I do not know if the name and context regarding the perpetrators got lost in translation, but this (Draupadi) shows the Indian military in a feeble light. We do not want our students to hate them based on fictional stories” (Agarwal 2021). On the other hand, academics were disgusted by the very process of encountering realistic descriptions of rape. A campus official indicated that the text should be removed “because it describes a rape” (Mohanty and Venkatesh 2021). Another official complained that “the scenes of rape have been described in gruesome detail which can make grown adults uncomfortable, I do not know how professors are teaching the text” (Agarwal 2021). What is expected in these responses is that their opinion is influenced not by the literary merit of the text but by the socio-political ramifications of analyzing it in an academic space. Members of the DU Academic Council, including faculty, opposed the removal of the text, arguing that it stemmed from “a prejudice against the representation of Dalits, tribals, women and sexual minorities” (Agarwal 2021). Tina Das, an Assistant Professor at DU, wrote about her experience of “choosing discomfort” while teaching texts like “Draupadi,” suggesting that, when read in conjunction with current political events executed by repressive state apparatuses, texts like these are “a chilling reminder that fiction is never far from the truth, and can resurface over and over again, as long as women’s bodies remain the site of conflict and violence” (Das 2021). In light of these polarizing tensions between bureaucrats and scholars about Devi’s text, I believe it is appropriate to solicit the reactions of the people that the curriculum most influences, which are students.
As I stacked up the five affective spectrums of students’ reading of “Draupadi,” I found an abundance of the colors grey, black, green, and orange. These colors, as I indicated before, denote, respectively, the Rasas of Karuna (sadness), Bhayanaka (fear), Bibhitsa (disgust), and Veera (heroism) (see Figure 7). There are three significant issues in this short story that we might understand as controversial and consequently causing these emotions: the politics of the armed state, the Naxal actions, and Dopdi’s rape. The vertical axis in Figure 4 is a visual representation of the five students’ annotations, while the horizontal axis marks the progression of their annotations.12 In my close reading of their annotations, I will identify the emotions felt and identified by students during the descriptions of controversial issues, the similarities and dissimilarities between them, and their overall comparison with bureaucratic remarks. Then, our next step will be to understand, by closely reading the annotated text, how the students’ annotations were different from the overall label of “offensive." It is important to understand that the objectified Rasas or colored labels, the process of Affective Landmarking, and the spectrum serve different purposes—of ease of representation of experience, the act of inclusion and becoming through reading, and an object of distant study and reflection for the audience, respectively.
All five students read the short story in vastly different ways, yet their responses' similarities were apparent in some passages. In this section I will identify three key responses to Draupadi, drawn from the students’ annotations during a close reading assignment using the digital tool Doccano, followed by individual interviews.When they read the passages in the narrative in which Dopdi and Dulna, the Naxal couple, were introduced as leaders of the peasant rebellion, only one student felt disgusted. The narrator describes Dopdi’s rebel network as follows: “Since after escaping from Bakuli, Dopdi and Dulna have worked at the house of virtually every landowner, they can efficiently inform the killers about their targets and announce proudly that they too are soldiers, rank and file” (Devi 2012, 394). Where Chetna and Neeraj wondered at the description, Sachin and Umi felt fear. Sachin’s fear sympathizes with the Naxal couple, as he says, “they are fighting the government when it sides with the wealthy few, the already powerful, on behalf of their people. They are the underdogs of the story. This is the source of my fear” (Sachin 2023). On the other hand, Hayat felt disgusted by their actions. It is interesting to see that the only person who lives in a militarized zone, Hayat, did not record a positive emotion and instead felt disgusted. When I asked Hayat about this, she said, “I felt the emotion of disgust, not at the political actions of the Naxals but of the status quo that does not leave an option for the marginalized besides picking up arms. I think the source of this disgust might be my upbringing in a disarrayed political landscape” (Hayat 2023). This conclusion, of course, is far from a stereotypical right-wing assumption that Kashmiri people might support an insurgency even if it is fictionalized.
Another sequence of the narrative, Dopdi’s rape, one of the peak reasons for the controversy around this story, elicited pleasantly surprising solidarity among students' responses. As indicated before, Senanayak issues the command that his soldiers “make her” or teach her to repent her actions by gangraping her. The description starts with Dopdi waking up from an unconscious state: “In the muddy moonlight she lowers her lightless eye, sees her breasts, and understands that, indeed, she has been made upright. Her breasts are bitten raw, the nipples torn. How many? Four-five-six-seven-then Draupadi had passed out” (Devi 2012, 401). Neeraj, who felt disgusted, indicated that this was a result of disgust being “a particular feeling” (Neeraj 2023). He elaborated, “I only feel that when reading something disturbing makes me feel unable to process my feeling about it…I believe I felt disgusted at the ghastly description of the rape scene, which was so explicit” (Neeraj 2023). On the other hand, Hayat felt angry and told me, “I'm a woman. Reading or knowing about any act of gender-based violence has the potential to get me angry” (Hayat 2023). While one might expect that the students might be repulsed by the words “breasts are bitten raw…nipples torn,” we must remember that they were invested in the political urgency of the story. As we remember, these students participated in aesthetic reading, prioritizing their experience of reading the text. This experience can cause an Affective Landmark based on a contextual understanding of a sentence or one influenced by a triggering word. That is to say, certain words like “nipples torn” are bound to trigger an emotional response like disgust, but students understand that this response does not lead to offense.
Dopdi refuses to comply when Senanayak asks her to cover up the “disgusting” sight of her body: “Draupadi stands before him, naked” (Devi 2012, 402). After reading this crucial moment of Dopdi’s rebellion, Chetna, Umi, and Sachin reported experiencing the feeling of heroism. Neeraj wonders over it, and Hayat is once again disgusted. A denser moment follows in the narrative:
Draupadi's black body comes even closer. Draupadi shakes with an indomitable laughter that Senanayak simply cannot understand. Her ravaged lips bleed as she begins laughing. Draupadi wipes the blood on her palm and says in a voice that is as terrifying, sky splitting, and sharp as her ululation, What's the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man? […] Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid. (Devi 2012, 402)
Neeraj, Umi, and Sachin read this, too, as a cause for heroism. Chetna experienced sadness, but Hayat was angry. She shared this with me: “When one laughs as a trauma response, it is either because their pain has gone beyond the threshold or because they have had a mental breakdown. The whole scenario that caused a woman to be humiliated to such an extent that she lost her mind made me feel angry and disgusted” (Hayat 2023). Hayat’s anger reminds us of the grimness of Dopdi’s laughter. Heroism as an emotion is interesting in this scene because the students annotate based on the suggested Rasa, not just the emotion contained by the cause of the Rasa, i.e. the character. As discussed earlier, Rasa is an amalgamation of the environment, the voluntary and involuntary emotional responses of the actors, and the transient moods of the reader. Then, the students identify a holistic sense of heroism. As Neeraj told me in his post-annotation interview, “Her mere laugh in front of the tyrants is a rebellious expression” (Neeraj 2023). These responses indicate that a majority of the students prioritized the injustice that Dopdi has suffered over the gruesome detailing of her rape.
I asked each student this question: Which feelings give rise to an offended state for you? Were you offended by this story? They replied: “disgust and anger” (Neeraj 2023) and “anger” (Hayat 2023). Moreover, all of them mentioned that while these emotions might eventually lead to offense, being offended was not a discrete emotional state for them. By “discrete,” I mean negative emotions will not necessarily cause that offense. For instance, Hayat drew a thin line between offense and anger: “I was not offended by the story. I did, however, feel the ache of the characters, and it gave rise to anger in me. I think what Dopdi goes through in this story should be infuriating for any reader. So it was for me” (Hayat 2023). At the same time, they recognized that sources of emotions are more important than the emotions themselves. Two people might feel angry, disgusted, and offended for entirely different reasons. In Neeraj’s words, “This story, however, did not offend me; it was intended to make the privileged uncomfortable as it did” (Neeraj 2023). On top of the color chaos of the spectrum as a digital contribution, the student rationale behind each annotation acts as a deep dive into the reading process; the digital spectrum just attempts to fashion it for consumption by educators who might never attempt to interrogate such rationales. At the same time, rather than reducing complex emotions, it serves as a tool for visually surfacing patterns and emotional shifts that might otherwise remain abstract or unspoken. As a color-coded map of affect, the spectrum offers a clear and immediate way to grasp how emotional engagement unfolds across a text. This visual clarity is particularly valuable for educators, as it transforms affective data into something tangible—opening space for discussion, comparison, and reflection. Might these spectrums be presented to conservative academics in power in a similar fashion to the way Dopdi presented her naked body to her tormentor?
The overarching conclusion is this: Not all students think or feel the same way about a literary text. As a digital pedagogical approach or method, Affective Landmarking can measure students’ emotional responses to literary texts. It also supports/enhances the close reading method with a framework for reading a text using Doccano by creating a real-time record of affective engagement. Louise Rosenblatt directly recognizes the need for both logical and emotional ways of reading. She writes:
The literary experience may provide the emotional tension and conflicting attitudes out of which spring the kind of thinking that can later be assimilated into actual behavior. The emotional character of the student’s response to literature offers an opportunity to develop the ability to think rationally within an emotionally colored context. (Rosenblatt, “Literature as Experience” 217)
For Rosenblatt, the emotional engagement with literature “assimilates” into students’ emotional responses outside the classroom. My project advances the idea that each student’s emotional responses form the classroom space. I think there are two implications of employing Affective Landmarking in the classroom beyond my project. First, students form their emotional responses to the text through a transaction between their sociocultural background and the text. Second, these emotional responses are discussed in a classroom, responding to the instruction by the teacher, the space of the classroom, etc. Even though Affective Landmarking seems individualistic, it is evident that students’ responses are inevitably affected by their lived experiences outside the classroom, including their sociocultural backgrounds, political opinions, etc. This is why, in pedagogy, it is essential to acknowledge that every student's transaction with the text will impact the conversations in the classroom, where multiple student voices converge. Digital spectrums allow us to access interpretations and induce conversations in class visually.
As my project neared completion, I asked the students what they had learned from Affective Landmarking. I had hoped that they would become more aware of how they go about reading. Hayat articulated this idea well: “Through the activity, I learned how a text can sensitize me regarding whatever theme it is discussing. I learned how to let myself be sensitized, feel, and become more empathetic after reading a piece of literature” (Hayat 2023). Neeraj, too, underscored this idea of becoming more self-aware:
Knowing what one feels is unique as it gives one a rare insight into their understanding of themselves. The Affective Landmarking activity pushed me to consciously interrogate what I was thinking when I was feeling a certain emotion. The annotation experience gave me the opportunity to understand how the reader's experience is not only shaped by the written text but also by the reader's background. (Neeraj 2023)
Along the same lines, Hayat replied, “Reading a text affectively was a new experience. It felt like somewhere along the line, I was doing justice to what I was reading because, for once, I was not trying to memorize the characters and the publishing dates but instead, just letting the text make me feel something” (Hayat 2023). The major takeaway of Affective Landmarking is not just the transaction, the Rasa, or the visualization, but this idea of slowing down while close reading, feeling the reading, is doing “justice” to the text and the reader.
Indeed, in the broader scope of this project, a rendering of which I plan to conduct in the First Year Writing American classroom in 2025, the possibility of students experiencing a lot of “negative” emotions is a significant aspect under consideration. My response is that such reactions do not negate the pedagogical value of the experience; rather, they highlight the necessity of scaffolded engagement with difficult literature. Negative emotions—disgust, anger, sadness, even fear—are powerful affective data points that must be used to further conversation and analysis. They reveal the ways students are locating themselves in relation to structural violence, historical trauma, and literary representation. As is the case with personalized co-created pedagogy, I believe in the necessity of fostering discomfort by asking why certain emotions are negative. However, discomfort-pedagogy should have strong ethical boundaries and caution must be mediated by the instructor. Affective Landmarking must be done with appropriate Trigger Warnings and context disclosure. The practice of Affective Landmarking is designed precisely for moments of uncertainty: to offer students a vocabulary to metabolize difficult emotions rather than bypass them. Reading past “offense” and similar parochial descriptors of literature allows students to ask not only “why does this text bring up uncomfortable emotions for me?” but also “what systems, histories, and ideologies are shaping my response?” Thus, Affective Landmarking is incomplete without reflection.
Affective Landmarking has the potential to transform pedagogy by repositioning emotional response as central—rather than peripheral—to critical thinking and textual analysis. Traditionally, pedagogical experiments based on close reading have privileged detachment and objectivity, often sidelining affect as irrational or distracting. This approach or method challenges that norm by framing emotional reactions as well as the intentional aesthetic reading process as productive sites of inquiry in India and beyond. By equipping students with a common vocabulary, and using a visual spectrum as a conversation starter, I have offered a digital methodology sound for a diverse classroom. Emotions bridge disciplines—close reading is at the core of students’ engagement with literature, film, historical documents, contemporary media, etc. It opens up space for culturally responsive pedagogy, where students' emotional landscapes are not only acknowledged but also theorized by them. Instructors can use or even mend it to ensure equitable close reading, facilitate deeper classroom dialogue, and cultivate critical empathy. Ultimately, it enhances pedagogy by aligning entitlement to emotions with slow reading, encouraging students to think deeply about how and why texts move them—and what that movement reveals about the world they inhabit.
