The Criterion: An International Journal in English

Volume 17, Issue 5 · October 2026 · ISSN 0976-8165

Corridors of Power and Panopticism: Departmental Politics, Flattery Economy and Gendered Resistance in Vikas Sharma’s novel, All Her Fires: Every Flame She Lit Had a Cost in the Light of NEP 2020

Mr. Mukesh Kumar

Digital Object Identifier

https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.16

Professor Vikas Sharma’s All Her Fires (2026) is ostensibly marketed as a novel about women. However, its central achievement lies in portraying the Indian State University as a site of departmental politics in the NEP 2020 era. Through close reading of a fictional State University, where Professor Viren, an idealist Head of Department, confronts Vice-Chancellor worship, enquiry committees, audit scams, and WhatsApp surveillance, this article examines how power operates through what Foucault calls the micro-physics of power. The novel’s three protagonists, Disha in a salwar suit, Shivani as keeper of emotional labour, and Sanya as a Gen Z strategist who treats academia as a passport to mobility, embody gendered resistance to a corrupt academic field, a struggle for academic capital that Bourdieu terms. Using textual evidence, the study shows how Sharma fictionalises governance failures: illegal appointments, splitting projects to evade tenders, silencing student unions, and weaponising caste and gender complaints. The corridor metaphor captures the precarity of ad hoc faculty and female scholars, while “corridors of power” analyses how a tyrant captures NEP 2020’s promise of holistic, ethical education. The novel shows that departmental politics erodes integrity, forces lonely survival, and alienates contemporary learners, for whom University appears as a bazaar, not a temple. It situates the novel within the third wave of Indian campus novels and connects it to higher education reform.

Kumar, Mukesh. “Corridors of Power and Panopticism: Departmental Politics, Flattery Economy and Gendered Resistance in Vikas Sharma’s novel, All Her Fires: Every Flame She Lit Had a Cost in the Light of NEP 2020.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 268-83, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.16.

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