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Name: Rajiv Vrudhula

Graduation Year: '90

address: 2119 Hearst Ave, #5
Berkeley, CA 94709

occupation: Law Student

Email address: rmvrudhu@home.com

I graduated in 1990, and then worked in a law firm for a year in Oakland, California. I then taught English as a Foreign Language in Bratislava, in the former Czechoslovakia. I returned to California, and went back to the same law firm for another year.

In 1993, I entered the University of Chicago's MA-PhD program in English.
I received my Master's Degree in 1994, and wrote my thesis on Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada under the direction of William Veeder.

I then began the long, sometimes painful journey of getting a doctorate! My subfields of specialization (the fields which I was tested in for my oral exams) were "Colonial/Postcolonial/Diasporic Subjectivity" (major list w/Homi Bhabha), "Modernism" (minor list w/Robert von Hallberg), and "Postmodernism" (minor list w/W.J.T. Mitchell). I should say that having a philosophy background, especially in continental philsophy and post-structuralist theory, helped me immensely while at Chicago. Literature programs in general want to produce theoretically sophisticated critics; often students in English departments have not studied "theory" to the extent that a philosophy student can. If some of you reading this do contemplate a similar path, having a philosophy background is extremely helpful. (I had to pick up a few literature courses at Berkeley before Chicago would let me in, but I never felt that I was at a disadvantage as compared to my peers from English departments).

I think that postcolonial theory in its various forms is dominating a number of academic conversations in literature (my view of course may be skewed). This theory is firmly based in a continental tradition extending back to Hegel and continuing up through Marx, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, etc. I don't know that many undergraduate literature departments provide the kind of exposure to these texts that a Philosophy department can (and which Williams did, at least when I was there).

After my oral exams, I wrote a novel entitled Samsara, which was published this year by a small press out of Chicago. This piece has a direct relationship to my undergraduate honors thesis at Williams, which is a (far too ambitious!!) intertextual exploration of deconstruction and Buddhist philosophy. The link: I did a lot of research on tantrism, which provided the historical background for at least part of my novel. The novel in general looks at life in the South Asian diaspora.

I began working for Prof. Bhabha as his research assistant in 1996, and began to formulate my dissertation topic. My dissertation was completed in December of 1999. The title is "The Bengali Babu: Ideology, Stereotype and the Quest for Authenticity in Colonial South Asian Literature." My committe was comprised of my director, Prof. Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Saree Makdisi. All this means that my academic specialty now is South Asian colonial and postcolonial literature and history. The link to Williams is again pretty clear to me, since I first came across "post-sructuralist" theories in the Philosophy and Religion departments, and also began my explorations of Indian philosophy, which developed into a keen interest in the re/production of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities.

Somewhere in the midst of all this academic research, I decided to go to law school. (I had the usual complaints about academia: low pay, no security, didn't want to move off to God-knows-where.) I entered Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley in the Fall of 1999. This meant that for my first semester I was running home after my Torts or Property class or whatever and feverishly revising my dissertation to meet my final orals examination deadline. I don't recommend this!!

I'm in my second year of law school. I plan to practice as a corporate attorney, and I am especially interested in venture financing, and high tech mergers and acquisitions. I plan to interview for positions both in the Bay Area and in New York City. As far as thhe applicability of a Philosophy degree to law school: the usual comments hold true. It does help with critical thinking and writing skills. I should say, though, that law school is not a terribly intellectual place, so that may be a little disappointing after a few years of philosophical reflection at Williams. It does, however, provide a world of readily apparent useful knowledge. (So does academic work, I think, but you have to do some explaining before it becomes obvious how.)

Rajiv