KOZHIKODE: More than nine million hits across 200 countries. Recommended by over 200 universities across the globe including Oxford, Duke, and King’s College London. Thousands of paid audio lectures made available for free.
Access to 16 e-magazines including The New Yorker and the Times Literary Supplement. With many more such features, the academic world of English literature is tipping its hat to the blog Literariness.org created by a Malayali.
Nasrullah Mambrol, a guest teacher in English at the NAM College, Kallikkandy, near Panoor, launched the blog five years ago when he stumbled upon a lack of resources while preparing for the NET examination.
“It’s too difficult for an Indian research student to get international materials without paying a hefty amount,” says the 32-year-old from Vanimel near Kuttiyadi in Kozhikode district.
“Students have to shell out lakhs to individually access academic repositories like JSTOR or Springer or to subscribe to international publications. I found this gap huge and tried to address it in the form of a blog focusing on English literature and criticism.”
And he has set a target. “I want to make global resource materials available to the needy free of charge.” Now, the blog has a ‘request book/article’ link through which any e-book or paywalled article is shared for free on request. The blog has 700 posts and another MCQ software link which is a vast question bank and notes to crack the NET/JRF/CUCET/MA/MPhil/PhD entrance examinations.
Nasrullah is all set to archive one lakh literary theories, criticism and e-books by the year-end. “Many free e-books will become paid after one or two years. So I want to archive them now so anyone can access them free of cost.
”A one-man army, he writes all the posts. He has a request to the authorities concerned — adopt a liberal policy towards accessing resource materials.
“Paying Rs 4,000 for an article written a century ago is not good for knowledge dissemination. All such repositories are open for a student in New York, but not in third world countries. This is social inequality, which should be resolved,” Nasrullah says.
He has 75 WhatsApp groups consisting of thousands of teachers/research scholars who benefit from the free gateway to the treasure house of resources. An MPhil holder, he has worked with several colleges as an English teacher. He studied in Malayalam medium schools up to Plus II and became interested in the theory side of English literature while doing MPhil under the Kannur University.