More than 9 million hits across 200 countries, recommended by 200 plus Universities across the globe including Oxford, Duke, London King's College, thousands of paid audio lectures made available free of charge, availability of 16 e-magazines including The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement. The English literature academic world is literally taking a bow at the blog, www.Literariness.org which was founded by a Keralite, Nasrullah Mambrol, now a guest teacher in English at NAM College Kallikandy near Panoor.
A native of Vanimel near Kuttiady, he launched the blog five years ago when stumbled upon the lack of resources while preparing for NET examination. "It's too difficult for an Indian research student to get international materials without paying a hefty amount. They have to shell out lakhs of rupees 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. I have set a big target to bring the global resource materials available to the needy free of charge," said Nasrullah.
The blog has a 'Request book/article' link through which any e-book or paywalled article is shared free of c cost on request. The blog has 700 posts and another MCQ software link which is a vast question bank and detailed notes for cracking NET/JRF/CUCET/MA/MPhil/PhD entrance examinations. Nasrullah had paid audio lectures made available in the blog for free. Further, he has been using his membership at Victoria State Library and New York Public Library to make available restricted access materials to a wide crop of people in the academic world.
"I have been making use of borrowed credentials as well. Many teachers and scholars who had benefitted from the blog had helped me in return," he says. The recommendation of globally renowned universities has helped essays published in the blog appear on top in a Google search. Nasrullah Mambrol is all set to archive one lakh literature theories, criticism and e-books by year-end. "The many e-books available free for now will be made paid after one or two year. So, I want to archive it now so that anyone can access it free of cost," he says.
He has another 75 WhatsApp groups consisting of thousands of teachers/research scholars who benefit from the free gateway to the treasure of resources. The 32-year old MPhil holder had worked in many colleges as an English teacher. Studied in Malayalam medium up to plus-two, and then got interested in the theory side of English literature while doing MPhil under Kannur University.