Personal Statement:
I am interested in questions of intimate and embodied experience of ‘borders’ as archived in cultural sites like the food practices of a community in North East India, called the Sylhetis. I explore the meanings of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ through the liminal condition of the Indian Sylhetis. I pursue their collective memory archived in culinary cultures, and the gendered labour of women in the household to investigate how post-Partition of India, 1947 have the Sylhetis negotiated their self-identity in the shifting contours of identity politics in post independence Assam. I link a postcolonial critique of the Indian nationalism and its frontier politics in Assam with the subalternised cultural plane of the Sylhetis, to understand the relationship of collective memory with lateral resistance in diasporic culture of the Sylhetis.
As a side project I also pursue an academic interest in BTS, the global k-pop phenomenon. I am specifically engaged in studying their music and multimedia content from the perspective of global capitalism, forms of affective labour, and alter-ontologies embedded in articulations of global youth precarity.
In the past, my MPhil dissertation was an investigation of the politics of gender in colonial travel writing, specifically in the works of Fanny Parks on India. I argued that a gendered and ontological re-interpretation of the category of ‘travel’ reflected in how Parks appropriated the materiality of her travel objects to posit a self-fashioning that challenged the gendered structures of colonial knowledge production in 19th century Britain.
Courses Taught:
Reader
HIST 141B- Twentieth-Century Britain (Spring 2020)
Teaching Assistant
HIST 8- Introduction to Latin American History (Fall 2020)
Conference Presentations
- Panelist: “BTS and Cultural Competency in the Media”, Rhizome Connect, The R3 Journal (August, 2020)
- “Singing Singularity: BTS in making their liminal mark on map of music’s categories”, Rhizome Connect, the R3 Journal (August, 2020)
- “Hidol Shukti’ and the identarian anxiety in Sylheti bodies of India”, AIIC Symposium, UCSB (February, 2020)
- “Collectivity and problem of the Archive in the Sylheti Remembrance of the Partition”, Encountering The Archive, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi (April, 2018)
- “Body and Sexuality in Rekhti poetry of 19th century Lucknow”, Annual Conference, Forum on Contemporary Theory, Baroda (December 2014)
- “Construction and Assertion of identities in 19th century Khasi Hills”, Conference on Colonial North East India, University of Delhi and University of Melbourne (December 2014, India International Centre, New Delhi)