Introducing... Professor Rosinka Chaudhuri

Rosinka Chaudhuri is Director and Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). She was inaugural Mellon Professor of the Global South at Oxford University, 2017-18, and has held visiting positions at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, King’s College, London, Delhi University, Cambridge University and Columbia University.

Her books include Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (Seagull: 2002), Freedom and Beef-Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture (Orient Blackswan: 2012) and The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Cultural Sphere (Oxford University Press: 2013, Peter Lang: 2014). She is in the process of completing a book tentatively titled Young Bengal and the Making of the Modern Indian, forthcoming in 2024.

Project at IAS

Colonial as well as post-colonial history writing, when speaking of the shaping of modern India, typically presents the nineteenth century in a linear, teleological and developmental narrative of social and political reform guided by the work of great men. These narratives curiously and consistently elide the chaotic and eventful decades of the 1830s-40s as they unfolded in Calcutta, the capital of the British Empire in India, decades that elude being straitjacketed into a progressivist narrative of achievement and success. In the messy politics of debate, disruption and scandal that characterise these decades, many things changed, not least the grammar and rhetoric of being a modern Indian. Yet the historiography behaves as if nothing happened in those years that needs attention.

Her work at the IAS aims to supplement research already in place towards a book that will show that these missing decades are critical to any understanding of the culture of politics and social reform in modern India. 

Read the full project abstract: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/professor-rosinka-chaudhuri