About Me

Research Focus

My doctoral research explores magic realism and avant-garde cinema in India—focusing on Bengali and Hindi traditions that exist outside Bollywood's commercial circuits. I also engage with cultural theory, digital humanities, piracy and digital culture, postcolonial modernity, and the historiography of emotions.

My approach draws from literary studies, sociology, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and critical theory, pursuing curiosity in both breadth and depth—the belief that intellectual life combines imagination and aesthetics with method and analysis.

Intellectual Roots

My formative years were spent at Ramakrishna Mission Vidyapith in Purulia, where a rich tradition shaped my young mind. The celebrated painter Ramananda Bandopadhyay and his worthy descendant Panchugopal Dutta used to teach painting at the Vidyapith. We grew up listening to these stories.

The buildings themselves were works of art by renowned artist Sunil Pal, and the entire campus was a feast of artistic expression, especially from the Bengal School of Art. Living among the monks, and far away from urbanity, these wonderful years are the past that still provide me answers and guide me through my difficult moments in life.

This combined tradition of my lived experience—artistic and intellectual, spiritual and radical, rustic and urban—challenges and problematizes positions of "otherness" and tests discourse boundaries. This legacy of dialectics means continuous questioning—of self, culture, and knowledge itself.

Calcutta as Intellectual Catalyst

This dual inheritance—Calcutta's cosmopolitan intellectual energy and Vidyapith's artistic legacy—fundamentally shaped my thinking. Calcutta has always fused renaissance humanism with European intellectual traditions, Russian and Central-East European communist culture, and Latin American resistance movements, all bound by third-world solidarity.

Calcutta audiences have long embraced films from directors like Agnieszka Holland and Vera Chytilová. Theatre here brings Bertolt Brecht and Luigi Pirandello into conversation with local traditions. Günter Grass and Octavio Paz visited this city, alongside many other remarkable names.

The Subaltern Studies collective redefined historiography from here, and when Derrida visited in 1997, he came to the land of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the first English translator of his masterpiece Of Grammatology. Calcutta has been my intellectual catalyst—I remain endlessly fascinated by this city, love it and loathe it, and owe my intellectual development largely to it.

Beyond Academia

Alongside my research, I relish long hours of adda, especially the kind where I get to learn new things and receive great recommendations. Day by day, I'm also becoming increasingly interested in Digital Humanities—both computational tools and how technology reshapes our collective existence. In fact, I've built this portfolio website through collaborative work with AI—a fascinating example of how these new tools can democratize technical creation and bridge the gap between humanistic inquiry and digital implementation.

Reading and watching films would be cliché at this point, but yes, I enjoy doing both. I love to travel and follow the trails of history and stories that places hold. I also cherish a dream to learn cooking someday—there's something about transforming ingredients that connects to the creative work I do with ideas.

One of the greatest lures of academia is that it lets you travel abundantly—to newer places and to newer lives. I aim to bring South Asian cultural histories into global humanities conversations through teaching, research, and writing that speaks to both academic and general audiences.

Core Commitment

Whether through cinema, literature, or critical theory, I explore how culture illuminates our condition, how ideas travel and transform, and how different traditions can speak to one another in unexpected ways.

This website is an evolving archive of my scholarly engagements with culture, ranging from the rigorously academic to broader cultural commentary. I hope readers find some of the pieces worth their time.