Rimi B. Chatterjee
Encyclopedia
Rimi B. Chatterjee is an author based in Kolkata
(earlier Calcutta), India
. She has published three novels and one academic history which won the SHARP deLong Prize for History of the Book in 2006, as well as a number of translations and short stories. She has been nominated twice for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award
, once for fiction and once for translation. She teaches English at Jadavpur University
.
, Ulster, then lived for a time in Dorset, UK. She has a younger brother. The family returned to India in 1979. She spent the next seven years in North Bengal where her father, an ENT surgeon, was attached to a clinic. She came to Calcutta in 1986 to continue her education, living with friends and in paying guest accommodation. She went to Modern High School
, then Lady Brabourne College (1989–1991) an affiliate of the University of Calcutta
to study English literature. Around this time she began writing in earnest, producing mainly poems, but also some short stories and plays.
She joined Jadavpur University
for her MA degree in English (1991–1993). She worked for a few months for the Telegraph
newspaper, Calcutta, before leaving for the University of Oxford
to do doctoral research. She initially intended to do this on the piracy of P.B. Shelley's works by his contemporaries, but under the guidance of William St Clair
, who was already working on this topic for the book that ultimately became The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, she moved instead in the direction of studying publishing history in India. Eventually she researched Oxford University Press and Macmillan trading to South Asia. The title of her thesis was 'A History of the Trade to South Asia of Macmillan
and Company and Oxford University Press
, 1875 -1900' but she gathered enough material to continue this history till 1947.
She got her D.Phil in 1997 and returned to India. She married in 1998 but the marriage ended in divorce in 2001. In 1998 she began working as an editor with Bhatkal and Sen
, a small publishing house which produces scholarly titles in English
and Bengali
in the social sciences
and in gender studies
under the imprints 'Samya' and 'Stree'. There she oversaw authors like Kancha Ilaiah
and Bani Basu
. She contributed to the process of translating into English several important works by women such as Sulekha Sanyal
's Nabankur (The Seedling), Manikuntala Sen
's Shediner Kotha (In Search of Freedom) and Jyotirmoyee Devi
's The Impermanence of Lies. She also published a translation of Titu Mir, a novella
by Mahasweta Devi
for Seagull Books
, Kolkata, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Crossword Book Award for translation.
She began her career as an academic at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
in 2000. She began work on her first novel, tentatively titled 'Live Like a Flame', in 2001, but it failed to find a publisher until 2010 when it was published by HarperCollins
India under the title Black Light. She then moved to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
, where she was a fellow from 2003 to 2004. Much of the writing of her history of Oxford University Press was done there. She also published a translation of Abanindranath Tagore
's autobiography Apon Katha (as Apon Katha: My Story) in 2004. She wrote Signal Red while at the Centre, and the novel was published by Penguin India
in February 2005. By then she had joined Jadavpur University
as a lecturer in [English]. She also began conducting creative writing
workshops, mainly for prose fiction; the first was a two-day one at Jadavpur University in August 2005, conducted jointly with Amitav Ghosh
. In September 2005, shortly after she had begun writing The City of Love, she was diagnosed with diffuse large B cell lymphoma
and underwent chemotherapy
and radiotherapy, ending in March 2006. During this period, while confined to the house on account of low immunity, she completed the first draft of The City of Love, which was published in November 2007. The cancer is currently in remission.
In 2006 she wrote a script for a graphic novel
, titled 'Kalpa', which she submitted to Virgin Comics, India, but it was rejected shortly before Virgin Comics wound up operations in India. In 2008 she came in contact with a group of artists in Calcutta and restarted work on Kalpa. Currently Kalpa is into its seventh rescript, but work is likely to begin again by mid 2011. She is at present also working on Project C, a graphic magazine she is planning with Avijit Chatterjee, who designed the cover of Black Light. She created a short comic titled 'Killer' which appeared in the second anthology of Comix.India, and another titled 'The Bookshop on the Hill' for the comics journal Drighangchoo. She is working on her next prose novel, a far-future science fiction work titled 'Antisense'. She lives in Kolkata with Avijit Chatterjee and two dogs, Babulal and Putlibai, both of whom are rescued Indian pariahs.
The City of Love
is a historical novel
set against the spice trade in sixteenth century India ten years after Vasco da Gama
's landfall at Calicut in 1498. The story begins in 1510 with the fall of Malaka to the Portuguese under Afonso de Albuquerque
and ends in 1540 with Sher Shah Suri
's capture of Bengal
. Much of the action takes place in and near Chittagong
and Gaur
. The four main characters are Fernando Almenara, a Spanish spice trader who is forced to join a pirate ship, Daud Suleiman ibn Majid Al Basri, a pirate turned politician, Chandu, the son of a Shaivite priest who becomes by a twist of fate a Sufi
qawwal, and Bajja, a tribal girl who becomes a spiritual leader and eventually turns her back on the world. Other minor characters include a Sufi pir and a Tantric
wise woman, Dhumavati. All the characters are in search of the City of Love, which is similar to the concept of Prem Nagar in Baul
and Vaishnav thought and the Ashqabad of the Sufis. In May 2008 The City of Love was shortlisted for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award 2007 for fiction.
Signal Red is a science fiction
novel set in the near future in a world where totalitarian Hindutva
-style politics has gained control of India. It is about an Indian defence scientist working in a semi-secret state laboratory, who gradually discovers that his work is being used to develop highly unethical technologies including microwave cannons and bioweapons. At first he tries to ignore the implications of what he does, but eventually starts to question his bosses and go against the rules. He then has an encounter with a woman who is sent to 'serve' him at a hotel that shocks him into admitting his situation to himself, and he realises he can't live with the rot in the system that controls him. He runs, and his own weapons are turned against him.
, Bangladesh
and Burma covering the period up to 1947. The data on Oxford University Press is mostly hitherto unpublished archival material from confidential records generated by the Press. Her book Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India During the Raj is the first in-depth account of a large-scale European publisher interacting with Indian markets and authors, and raises several significant questions about the nature of the colonial encounter in India though the medium of print, particularly in the later stages of British Rule. For instance, in the case of Oxford University Press, its status as an academic press that had supported several key Indological
publishing ventures in the mid-nineteenth century gave it a cachet in the eyes of Indians that other presses could not have, and it was seen as pro-India as a result. At the same time its self-imposed custodianship of Indological study was questioned, not just by nationalist groups but also by many of its own authors. Furthermore, Oxford University Press often tried to tone down the imperialism of key authors such as Vincent Smith
. These findings go against more 'hegemonic' readings of Indian encounters with print, by scholars such as Gauri Vishwanathan.
Empires of the Mind won the SHARP deLong Prize for 2007, an international academic prize awarded annually by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing for outstanding work in the history of the book.
Kolkata
Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...
(earlier Calcutta), India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
. She has published three novels and one academic history which won the SHARP deLong Prize for History of the Book in 2006, as well as a number of translations and short stories. She has been nominated twice for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award
Vodafone Crossword Book Award
Vodafone Crossword Book Award is an Indian book award sponsored by Vodafone and Crossword Bookstores. It is India's biggest private sector award. The Award was instituted in 1998 with the intention of competing with The Booker Prize, Commonwealth Writers' Prize or The Pulitzer Prize.The award...
, once for fiction and once for translation. She teaches English at Jadavpur University
Jadavpur University
Jadavpur University , is a premier educational and research institution in India.It is located in Kolkata, West Bengal and comprises two campuses - the main campus at Jadavpur and the new campus at Salt Lake...
.
Biography
Rimi B. Chatterjee was born of expatriate Bengali parents in BelfastBelfast
Belfast is the capital of and largest city in Northern Ireland. By population, it is the 14th biggest city in the United Kingdom and second biggest on the island of Ireland . It is the seat of the devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly...
, Ulster, then lived for a time in Dorset, UK. She has a younger brother. The family returned to India in 1979. She spent the next seven years in North Bengal where her father, an ENT surgeon, was attached to a clinic. She came to Calcutta in 1986 to continue her education, living with friends and in paying guest accommodation. She went to Modern High School
Modern High School
Modern High School is an educational institution based in Hussaini Alam, Hyderabad, India. It has classes from Lower Kindergarten to 10th grade level. The institution conducts its classes as per the Secondary School Certificate syllabus of the State Government of Andhra Pradesh.-School...
, then Lady Brabourne College (1989–1991) an affiliate of the University of Calcutta
University of Calcutta
The University of Calcutta is a public university located in the city of Kolkata , India, founded on 24 January 1857...
to study English literature. Around this time she began writing in earnest, producing mainly poems, but also some short stories and plays.
She joined Jadavpur University
Jadavpur University
Jadavpur University , is a premier educational and research institution in India.It is located in Kolkata, West Bengal and comprises two campuses - the main campus at Jadavpur and the new campus at Salt Lake...
for her MA degree in English (1991–1993). She worked for a few months for the Telegraph
The Telegraph (Kolkata)
The Telegraph is an Indian daily newspaper founded and continuously published in Kolkata since 1982. It is published by the ABP Group and the newspaper vies with the Times of India for the position of having the widest widest circulation of any newspaper in Eastern India.According to the Audit...
newspaper, Calcutta, before leaving for the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
to do doctoral research. She initially intended to do this on the piracy of P.B. Shelley's works by his contemporaries, but under the guidance of William St Clair
William St Clair
William St Clair FBA, FRSL, is an academic and author. His research interests lie, in large part, in the history of books and reading, ancient Greece and biography. His work has contributed significantly to his fields of study...
, who was already working on this topic for the book that ultimately became The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, she moved instead in the direction of studying publishing history in India. Eventually she researched Oxford University Press and Macmillan trading to South Asia. The title of her thesis was 'A History of the Trade to South Asia of Macmillan
Macmillan Publishers
Macmillan Publishers Ltd, also known as The Macmillan Group, is a privately held international publishing company owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. It has offices in 41 countries worldwide and operates in more than thirty others.-History:...
and Company and Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
, 1875 -1900' but she gathered enough material to continue this history till 1947.
She got her D.Phil in 1997 and returned to India. She married in 1998 but the marriage ended in divorce in 2001. In 1998 she began working as an editor with Bhatkal and Sen
Bhatkal and Sen
Bhatkal & Sen is a publishing partnership between Mandira Sen and Popular Prakashan. The company is based in Calcutta and publishes the imprints Stree and Samya. It is noted for publishing authors such as Kancha Ilaiah, Om Prakash Valmiki, Tirumaavalavan, Gail Omvedt, Manikuntala Sen, Ashok Mitra, V...
, a small publishing house which produces scholarly titles in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and Bengali
Bengali language
Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...
in the social sciences
Social sciences
Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...
and in gender studies
Gender studies
Gender studies is a field of interdisciplinary study which analyses race, ethnicity, sexuality and location.Gender study has many different forms. One view exposed by the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one"...
under the imprints 'Samya' and 'Stree'. There she oversaw authors like Kancha Ilaiah
Kancha Ilaiah
Kancha Ilaiah is an Indian activist and writer. His books include Why I am not a Hindu, God As Political Philosopher: Budha's challenge to Brahminism, A Hollow Shell, The State and Repressive Culture, Manatatwam , and Buffalo Nationalism: A Critique of Spiritual Fascism.- Bibliography :*Why I Am...
and Bani Basu
Bani Basu
Bani Basu is a Bengali Indian author, essayist, critic and poet. She was educated at the well-known Scottish Church College and at the University of Calcutta....
. She contributed to the process of translating into English several important works by women such as Sulekha Sanyal
Sulekha Sanyal
-Biography:She grew up in Korokdi, now in Faridpur Bangladesh, in a decaying zamindar family that had once been indigo planters, and was to become a member of the Communist Party of India. An early influence on her was the Brahmo philosopher and reformer, Ramtanu Lahiri, who was related to her mother...
's Nabankur (The Seedling), Manikuntala Sen
Manikuntala Sen
Manikuntala Sen was one of the first women to be active in the Communist Party of India. She is best known for her Bengali-language memoir Shediner Kotha , in which she describes her experiences as a woman activist during some of the most turbulent times in India's history.-Early life:Manikuntala...
's Shediner Kotha (In Search of Freedom) and Jyotirmoyee Devi
Jyotirmoyee Devi
Jyotirmoyee Devi was an Indian writer in the early twentieth century. She wrote predominantly about women in the Rajasthan of her childhood and in what is now Bangladesh at the time of Partition...
's The Impermanence of Lies. She also published a translation of Titu Mir, a novella
Novella
A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...
by Mahasweta Devi
Mahasweta Devi
Mahasweta Devi is an Indian social activist and writer.- Biography :Mahasweta Devi was born in 1926 in Dhaka, to literary parents in a Hindu Brahmin family. Her father Manish Ghatak was a well known poet and novelist of the Kallol era, who used the pseudonym Jubanashwa...
for Seagull Books
Seagull Books
Seagull Books is a publishing venture begun in Kolkata in 1982 by Samik Bandopadhyay and Naveen Kishore, a theater practitioner who was working under Bandopadhyay at the time...
, Kolkata, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Crossword Book Award for translation.
She began her career as an academic at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
The Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur is an autonomous engineering, technology and management oriented institute of higher education established by the government of India in 1951...
in 2000. She began work on her first novel, tentatively titled 'Live Like a Flame', in 2001, but it failed to find a publisher until 2010 when it was published by HarperCollins
HarperCollins
HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...
India under the title Black Light. She then moved to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta is an autonomous research centre devoted to the research and advancement of the social sciences in South Asia...
, where she was a fellow from 2003 to 2004. Much of the writing of her history of Oxford University Press was done there. She also published a translation of Abanindranath Tagore
Abanindranath Tagore
Abanindranath Tagore was the principal artist of the Bengal school and the first major exponent of swadeshi values in Indian art. He was also a noted writer, particularly for children...
's autobiography Apon Katha (as Apon Katha: My Story) in 2004. She wrote Signal Red while at the Centre, and the novel was published by Penguin India
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...
in February 2005. By then she had joined Jadavpur University
Jadavpur University
Jadavpur University , is a premier educational and research institution in India.It is located in Kolkata, West Bengal and comprises two campuses - the main campus at Jadavpur and the new campus at Salt Lake...
as a lecturer in [English]. She also began conducting creative writing
Creative writing
Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...
workshops, mainly for prose fiction; the first was a two-day one at Jadavpur University in August 2005, conducted jointly with Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh , is a Bengali Indian author best known for his work in the English language.-Life:Ghosh was born in Calcutta on July 11, 1956, to Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh, a retired officer of the pre-independence Indian Army, and was educated at The Doon School; St...
. In September 2005, shortly after she had begun writing The City of Love, she was diagnosed with diffuse large B cell lymphoma
Diffuse large B cell lymphoma
Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma is a type of aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It accounts for approximately 40% of lymphomas among adults. The median age at diagnosis is 70 years, but it also occurs in children and young adults...
and underwent chemotherapy
Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy is the treatment of cancer with an antineoplastic drug or with a combination of such drugs into a standardized treatment regimen....
and radiotherapy, ending in March 2006. During this period, while confined to the house on account of low immunity, she completed the first draft of The City of Love, which was published in November 2007. The cancer is currently in remission.
In 2006 she wrote a script for a graphic novel
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
, titled 'Kalpa', which she submitted to Virgin Comics, India, but it was rejected shortly before Virgin Comics wound up operations in India. In 2008 she came in contact with a group of artists in Calcutta and restarted work on Kalpa. Currently Kalpa is into its seventh rescript, but work is likely to begin again by mid 2011. She is at present also working on Project C, a graphic magazine she is planning with Avijit Chatterjee, who designed the cover of Black Light. She created a short comic titled 'Killer' which appeared in the second anthology of Comix.India, and another titled 'The Bookshop on the Hill' for the comics journal Drighangchoo. She is working on her next prose novel, a far-future science fiction work titled 'Antisense'. She lives in Kolkata with Avijit Chatterjee and two dogs, Babulal and Putlibai, both of whom are rescued Indian pariahs.
Novels
Black Light, published in July 2010, is a mystery story in which a journalist discovers, after his artistic but rather odd aunt commits suicide, that she's left a trail of clues for him to follow. The trail takes him to five different places in Eastern India, where he finds five stories she has written and hidden in strange places. In the process, he also hears the story of how she visited these places and what she did there. When he finds all five, the secret of her life and death is unlocked. This novel is in fact a revised version of her first unpublished book, written in 2000-2001, which had the working title 'Live Like a Flame', which is now the title of her blog.The City of Love
The City of Love
The City of Love is a novel by Rimi B. Chatterjee set in 16th century Asia against the background of the spice trade, piracy and the rise of various mystical religious cults. It traces the lives of four characters all of whom are in search of spiritual and material fulfilment embodied in the idea...
is a historical novel
Historical novel
According to Encyclopædia Britannica, a historical novel is-Development:An early example of historical prose fiction is Luó Guànzhōng's 14th century Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which covers one of the most important periods of Chinese history and left a lasting impact on Chinese culture.The...
set against the spice trade in sixteenth century India ten years after Vasco da Gama
Vasco da Gama
Vasco da Gama, 1st Count of Vidigueira was a Portuguese explorer, one of the most successful in the Age of Discovery and the commander of the first ships to sail directly from Europe to India...
's landfall at Calicut in 1498. The story begins in 1510 with the fall of Malaka to the Portuguese under Afonso de Albuquerque
Afonso de Albuquerque
Afonso de Albuquerque[p][n] was a Portuguese fidalgo, or nobleman, an admiral whose military and administrative activities as second governor of Portuguese India conquered and established the Portuguese colonial empire in the Indian Ocean...
and ends in 1540 with Sher Shah Suri
Sher Shah Suri
Sher Shah Suri , birth name Farid Khan, also known as Sher Khan , was the founder of the short-lived Sur Empire in northern India, with its capital at Delhi, before its demise in the hands of the resurgent Mughal Empire...
's capture of Bengal
Bengal
Bengal is a historical and geographical region in the northeast region of the Indian Subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is mainly divided between the sovereign land of People's Republic of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, although some regions of the previous...
. Much of the action takes place in and near Chittagong
Chittagong
Chittagong ) is a city in southeastern Bangladesh and the capital of an eponymous district and division. Built on the banks of the Karnaphuli River, the city is home to Bangladesh's busiest seaport and has a population of over 4.5 million, making it the second largest city in the country.A trading...
and Gaur
Gaur
The gaur , also called Indian bison, is a large bovine native to South Asia and Southeast Asia. The species is listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List since 1986 as the population decline in parts of the species' range is likely to be well over 70% over the last three generations...
. The four main characters are Fernando Almenara, a Spanish spice trader who is forced to join a pirate ship, Daud Suleiman ibn Majid Al Basri, a pirate turned politician, Chandu, the son of a Shaivite priest who becomes by a twist of fate a Sufi
Sufism
Sufism or ' is defined by its adherents as the inner, mystical dimension of Islam. A practitioner of this tradition is generally known as a '...
qawwal, and Bajja, a tribal girl who becomes a spiritual leader and eventually turns her back on the world. Other minor characters include a Sufi pir and a Tantric
Tantra
Tantra , anglicised tantricism or tantrism or tantram, is the name scholars give to an inter-religious spiritual movement that arose in medieval India, expressed in scriptures ....
wise woman, Dhumavati. All the characters are in search of the City of Love, which is similar to the concept of Prem Nagar in Baul
Baul
Baul .Though Bauls comprise only a small fraction of the Bengali population, their influence on the culture of Bengal is considerable. In 2005, the Baul tradition was included in the list of "Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity" by UNESCO.-Etymology:The origin of the word...
and Vaishnav thought and the Ashqabad of the Sufis. In May 2008 The City of Love was shortlisted for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award 2007 for fiction.
Signal Red is a science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novel set in the near future in a world where totalitarian Hindutva
Hindutva
Hindutva is the term used to describe movements advocating Hindu nationalism. Members of the movement are called Hindutvavādis.In India, an umbrella organization called the Sangh Parivar champions the concept of Hindutva...
-style politics has gained control of India. It is about an Indian defence scientist working in a semi-secret state laboratory, who gradually discovers that his work is being used to develop highly unethical technologies including microwave cannons and bioweapons. At first he tries to ignore the implications of what he does, but eventually starts to question his bosses and go against the rules. He then has an encounter with a woman who is sent to 'serve' him at a hotel that shocks him into admitting his situation to himself, and he realises he can't live with the rot in the system that controls him. He runs, and his own weapons are turned against him.
Stories
- 'The Garden of Bombahia', about the sixteenth century scientist and heretic Garcia da Orta, appeared in Wasafiri 24(3):98-106.
- 'The First Rasa', about a woman printer in Calcutta's nineteenth century pleasure district, came out in Kolkata: Book City: Readings, Fragments, Images, ed. Sria Chatterjee and Jennie Renton (EdinburghEdinburghEdinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...
: Textualities, 2009). - 'Jessica', about an Anglo-IndianAnglo-IndianAnglo-Indians are people who have mixed Indian and British ancestry, or people of British descent born or living in India, now mainly historical in the latter sense. British residents in India used the term "Eurasians" for people of mixed European and Indian descent...
woman hairdresser of Portuguese descent in a Bengali neighbourhood in Calcutta, came out in Vislumbres: Bridging India and Iberoamerica 1 (2008):58-9. - 'The Key to All the Worlds', appeared in Superhero: The Fabulous Adventures of Rocket Kumar and Other Indian Superheroes, published by Scholastic India in 2007.[ISBN 81-7655-821-4]
Graphic Stories
- 'Killer' in Comix India Vol. 2: Girl Power
- 'The Bookshop on the Hill' in Drighangchoo Issue 3, Kolkata 2010. Part 2 of the story forthcoming in Drighangchoo Issue 4.
Histories
While in the UK she gathered material from various archives on the histories of Macmillan and Oxford University Press and their relationship with India, PakistanPakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
, Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Bangladesh , officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a sovereign state located in South Asia. It is bordered by India on all sides except for a small border with Burma to the far southeast and by the Bay of Bengal to the south...
and Burma covering the period up to 1947. The data on Oxford University Press is mostly hitherto unpublished archival material from confidential records generated by the Press. Her book Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India During the Raj is the first in-depth account of a large-scale European publisher interacting with Indian markets and authors, and raises several significant questions about the nature of the colonial encounter in India though the medium of print, particularly in the later stages of British Rule. For instance, in the case of Oxford University Press, its status as an academic press that had supported several key Indological
Indology
Indology is the academic study of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent , and as such is a subset of Asian studies....
publishing ventures in the mid-nineteenth century gave it a cachet in the eyes of Indians that other presses could not have, and it was seen as pro-India as a result. At the same time its self-imposed custodianship of Indological study was questioned, not just by nationalist groups but also by many of its own authors. Furthermore, Oxford University Press often tried to tone down the imperialism of key authors such as Vincent Smith
Vincent Arthur Smith
Vincent Arthur Smith was born in 1843 in Dublin which was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He was an Indologist, historian and art historian who worked in the Indian Civil Service and retired early to devote himself to his writing.His Oxford History of India, covering...
. These findings go against more 'hegemonic' readings of Indian encounters with print, by scholars such as Gauri Vishwanathan.
Empires of the Mind won the SHARP deLong Prize for 2007, an international academic prize awarded annually by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing for outstanding work in the history of the book.
External links
Reviews of Black Light
- Interview in the Statesman
- The Daily Bhaskar
- Mid Day
- IBNLive
- Afternoon Despatch and Courier
- The Book Lovers