Journal Blog
Introduction On August 20, 2025, at the Goethe-Institut in Kolkata, a Kolkata-based Computer Engineer and Sound Artist named Varun Desai sat down in front of a modular synthesizer to tune-in to a forgotten chapter of India’s past. Moderately bulky and thick with knobs and wiring, the instrument produced analog waves with the sustained notes of …
Last December, we walked through the red-brick corridors of the Alipore Jail Museum and entered an exhibition titled The Babu and the Bazaar: Art from 19th and Early 20th-Century Bengal. At first glance, it appeared to be a familiar archive of colonial Calcutta. It’s babus, courtesans, deities, print cultures, and bazaar economies. But in the …
Continue reading “Time as Capital, Time as Cosmos: Kalighat and the Politics of Waiting”
In the book, Hurt Sentiments, historian Neeti Nair traces a political history of secularism, one which made a virtue out of hurt in twentieth-century India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Nair asks how a religious sentiment of hurt come to define the place of law, culture, ideologies, and belonging in this region. In constituent assembly proceedings, courtroom …
The term ‘coming out’ is still unfamiliar to many Indians. It is safe to say that it is a new term known mostly to the urban, English-speaking world of India who are familiar with gender and sexual minorities. Coming out of the closet can mean different things to different people; it can be an emancipatory …
Continue reading “Transcending identities: Narrative reflection on the ritual of coming out”
We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Public Anthropologist Award 2021 is Ather Zia for her book Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir, University of Washington Press (2019) and Zubaan Publishing (2020). Ather Zia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Gender Studies Program at the University of Northern Colorado …
Continue reading “Winner of the Public Anthropologist Award 2021”
Saumya Pandey (SP): Shall we start with your research journey? How did you come to write about the lives of migrant workers from Northeast India? Dolly Kikon (DK): My work that we are speaking about relates to the second book I wrote with Bengt G. Karlsson, Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in …
The new book “suggested by Public Anthropologist” is Nightmarch. Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas by Alpa Shah. In this vibrant piece of anthropological work, Shah takes us into one of the most unreported rebellions in contemporary India with wisdom and courage. Her analysis of the motivations, modalities of implementation and failures of Naxalites’ struggle shapes a new history of both the exploitation they suffered and their fight for liberation. …
Continue reading “Suggested by Public Anthropologist – Nightmarch”