By TwoCircles.net staff reporter,
New Delhi: Jamia Millia Islamia’s (JMI) first journal Third Frame: Literature, Culture and Society was launched on 25th April by Vinod Mehta, Editor-in-Chief of the Outlook Group, in a programme at JMI.
Speaking at the journal launch ceremony, Mehta said there was a need to create a space for serious, non-academic writing which could bust the universal myth that people did not want to write more than 800-word articles because no one wanted to read more than 800 words at one go. He hoped that Third Frame , targeted at the informed lay reader, would meet the requirement. Others who spoke on the occasion included Dr Andrew Brown, Managing Director, Cambridge University Press, UK, Manas Saikia, Managing Director, Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd and Prof Mushirul Hasan (VC, JMI) and Rakhshanda Jalil (Media Coordinator, JMI), who are also joint-editors of the journal Third Frame . Cambridge University Press has published the first issue of the journal.
A press release issued by JMI today says the journal fulfils a long-felt need of the university to have a journal of its own for there has been concern that universities are, or should be, the disseminators of not just knowledge but ideas. Given its unique position in the nationalist-secular tradition of multi-cultural, pluralist India, Jamia Millia Islamia has always been a crucible for new ideas and newer ways of looking at things. It seemed in the fitness of things, therefore, for the JMI and Cambridge University Press to forge a partnership to launch a new journal, one that would be devoted to voices and concerns from the developing societies, says the release.
The journal will celebrate the diversity in terms of people’s profiles, passions and pursuits. As its sub-title indicates, Third Framewill bring together ideas and images, myths and metaphors, concepts and theories that have captured our collective consciousness and found representation in our literature, culture and society. The inaugural issue is devoted to sixty years of India’s Independence.