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MANU SUDHAKARA KURUP
Author. Writer. Teacher. Photographer.
About Me
Teacher. Writer. Photographer. Perpetual Questioner.
I teach literature, language, History and Theory of Knowledge, write poetry and fiction, take photographs, cook with unreasonable enthusiasm, and occasionally wonder whether the world has become more absurd or whether I have simply become less patient with it.
Trained in English Literature, Translation and Cultural Studies, I spend much of my professional life thinking about how we make meaning, whose stories we tell, and why the questions that matter rarely have convenient answers. The classroom is where much of this thinking happens. Books, photographs, films, politics, music and the everyday theatre of human behaviour provide the rest of the material.
I have written about Hyderabad, a city that has a habit of turning history into landscape and memory into argument. I continue to write poetry and fiction, teach young people to read more attentively, and take photographs of places and moments that deserve a second look.
This website is a record of those pursuits: my books and writing, academic work, photographs, essays and occasional excursions into subjects I probably ought to leave alone.
Look around. Disagree where necessary. Ask questions. And, if nothing else, read something that makes you think.
Tea and Tombs: Poems on Hyderabad
What if the history of a city could be read not only in its monuments and archives, but also in its street corners, cups of Irani chai, fading tombs, crowded bazaars and the everyday lives of its people?
In Tea and Tombs: Poems on Hyderabad, Manu S. Kurup turns to poetry to explore the layered identity of Hyderabad, a city where history and modernity coexist in fascinating, sometimes uncomfortable, proximity. Through a collection of haiku, Kurup captures the city's architectural grandeur, cultural contradictions, linguistic richness and unmistakable Dakhni spirit.
These poems look beyond the familiar postcard images of the Charminar and the city's historic monuments. They discover Hyderabad in its fleeting moments, forgotten histories, living traditions and urban ironies. With brevity, wit and an attentive eye, the poet finds a remarkable depth of meaning in ordinary scenes, revealing how a city's memory survives not merely in stone, but in language, food, humour and everyday life.
Part literary portrait, part cultural exploration, Tea and Tombs invites readers to encounter Hyderabad afresh: not as a static heritage site, but as a living, breathing city continually negotiating its past and present.
For those who love Hyderabad, poetry, history and the small details that reveal the larger truths of a place, this collection offers a compelling reason to pause, look closer and listen.
Some cities tell their stories in monuments. Hyderabad tells them over tea, beneath tombs, and in the spaces between memory and change.
Tea and Tombs: Poems on Hyderabad is published by Hawakal Publishers.
You can order the book right here. Buy Tea and Tombs: poems on Hyderabad Book Online at Low Prices in India | Tea and Tombs: poems on Hyderabad Reviews & Ratings - Amazon.in
Work Experience
2009 - 2016
Supposed to have been researching for MPhil and later a PhD. But I divided my time between New Delhi - Kolkata - Hyderabad and Thiruvananthapuram, sifting through archives and libraries, meeting cartoonists and fiction writers and understanding the nuances of The Emergency period. I loved, quarreled, disagreed, understood and wrote and deleted!
2016 - Now
After my PhD, I continued independent research (fancy name for joblessness), broke my body, married and took on a job to have three square meals; taught English language, Gender Sensitization, Post Colonial Theory, Translation Theory until I got bored of the academic world. More than that, I became a father. So I took on teaching plain old English Language and Literature and Theory of Knowledge. More money. More Time and More World!
Education
2003 - 2006 - BA in English Language Literature, along with Sociology and A History of British Colonialism from St. Berchman's College, Kerala.
2006 - 2008 - MA in English Language Literature from University of Hyderabad, Telangana
2009 - 2010 - MPhil in Translation and Cultural Studies from Center for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies from University of Hyderabad, Telangana
2010 - 2015 - PhD in Translation and Cultural Studies from Center for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies from University of Hyderabad, Telangana
