About me
Who am I?
I’m a student of Sanskrit and Bengali literary cultures. I’m interested in Sanskrit and Bengali literary cultures from the 17th to the early 19th century in Bengal. I engage mostly with Sanskrit and Middle Bengali poetry produced in small royal courts in Central Bengal and their reception during the 19th century. My work not only explores the late medieval/early modern of Bengal, it also poses questions of how notions of periodization, especially the idea of the middle ages, were used, conceived and deployed in early colonial Bengal. My research encompasses different approaches, ranging from cultural history and philology, medievalism, to environmental history.
Research
My dissertation investigates the formation of the idea of the Middle Ages during the 18th and 19th centuries in Bengal and the emergence of new discourses, in English and Bengali about time, epochal change, and historical periodization. My work reads closely literary, historical, poetic and scientific documents in Sanskrit, medieval and modern Bengali, and English to explore how the literary, cultural and even natural past of the region became a contentious site where categories like ‘chronology’ and temporal concepts like ‘old’ and ‘new’ were imagined, debated and given content. My dissertation traces the non-linear history of teleological time outside Europe, straddling different temporal, linguistic and epistemological divides.
