R K Dasgupta
Biographic Data
| ID | 35131 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R K Dasgupta |
| GIVEN NAMES | R K |
| FAMILY NAME | Dasgupta |
| SIGNATURE | DASGUPTA R K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Glasgow |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5837-0088 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Between media capture and journalistic autonomy: The lived experience of Indian journalists
This study examines how journalistic autonomy is experienced and negotiated within conditions of accelerating media capture in contemporary India. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with journalists across organizational tiers, linguistic regions, and media formats, the study analyses how political pressure, economic dependence, and organizational hierarchies coalesce into a structurally embedded regime of influence. Using Bourdieu’s field the…
A feminist critique of cybersecurity: Techno feminist imaginaries of vulnerability and care
In this collection of five short essays, each authors examine how online spaces produce and reproduce queer marginalisation while also offering opportunities for queer expression, connection, and resistance. Tanvi Kanchan examines Indian queer activists’ connections with Indigenous and Black politics in the U.S. and anti-gender rhetoric that travels between American conservative contexts and Indian Hindutva contexts to highlight how digitally med…
Queer patchwork assemblages: Three poetic vignettes
Between 2011 and 2023 I was traveling between New Delhi and Kolkata to research queer male intimacy and community making in India especially in the context of burgeoning digital queer spaces and queer organising around section 377. The poems here which come out of ethnographic vignettes during this work transcend traditional frameworks and delve deeper into the lived experiences and conditions that shape the possibilities for queer lives. They st…
Chapter 4: Metanarratives of Nation: Race, Caste, and Religion
Evolution of Female Desire and Fantasy in Bollywood Cinema: Perspectives from Male and Female Directors in the Post-Liberalization Era
The camaraderie between cinema and fantasy has a prolonged story, as one escalates the other. Since echoes of 'sexual fantasies’ and ‘gaze’ in cinema have been primarily celebrated and fantasized through patriarchal prisms, Bollywood and female desire have historically been fraught with challenges. However, Bollywood cinema has lately been undergoing significant landscape twists by featuring female fantasies in a bold and progressive manner at th…
Media and Citizenship in India: Heteronomy and Autonomy in the Indian Journalistic Field
Since 2014, India has experienced a shift towards a new phase of democracy, often described as an “ethnic democracy.” Political theorists argue that this phase promotes a Hindu conception of the nation, contrasting with the secularism embedded in the Indian Constitution, and is marked by attacks on ethnic and religious minorities, particularly Muslims. Some media scholars suggest that controlling mass media has been a crucial strategy in generati…
Consuming and retailing fashion: South Asian diaspora negotiating clothing practices, identities and community making in Glasgow
This article explores South Asian diasporic fashion retail spaces and sartorial practices in Glasgow. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic research, it investigates how fashion and clothing contribute to identity construction, community building, and cultural blending among British South Asians. Utilising patchwork ethnography and city walking, the article presents the lived experiences of shopkeepers and consumers, demonstrating the interplay o…
Between visibility and elsewhere: South Asian queer creative cultures and resistance
This article draws on existing interviews and creative material from LGBTQ + South Asians who have lived and spent significant time in the UK as part of the Cross Border Queers project. It begins by considering creative forms of diasporic activism and creativity in the UK that have emerged from South Asian LGBTQ + communities and individuals. We discuss the ways in which South Asian LGBTQ + diasporic organising was formed through a sense of share…
Queer Politics in Times of New Authoritarianisms
Across South Asia and the world, new authoritarianisms in the last two decades have reignited old fault lines around sexuality. This introduction examines how different states, laws and communities have engaged with queer rights discourse with a range of outcomes. It argues that despite a spate of recent progressive legislations, there is no direct correlation between LGBTQI+ rights and liberal governance in South Asia. Framing contributions that…
Queer creative Indian city: Queer film festivals, precarious cultural work and community making in Kolkata
In this article, we offer a new concept of the “queer creative city”, through a critical examination of how a regional queer Bengali film culture has emerged in Kolkata as a result of the convergence of certain urban policies, queer political organising and cultural activism.We explore two queer film festivals in Kolkata – the Siddharth Gautam Film Festival and Dialogues, both having a very significant impact in transforming LGBTQ + lives in Kolk…
Mapping innovation in India’s creative industries: An ecosystem framework
This paper reports on an ongoing research study funded by UKRI to map India’s creative industries. Using an ecosystem framework, it has focused on strategy/policy; tangible and intangible infrastructure; funding and investment to understand innovation drivers and barriers across nine sub-sector value chains. The research established there is no one creative industries policy. Responsibility is split across 16 government ministries and 28 states. …
The cultural industries of India: An introduction
No abstract available
Mourning a Queer Aunty: Kinship, Creative Resilience and World-Making
Indian queer and trans activist Agniva passed away in 2016. This article draws on memoir, anecdote, research interviews and digital ethnography to explore the impact that Agniva had on a range of queer and trans people. The author details experiences he shared with Agniva and analyses virtual memorials and obituaries for her in order to account for the emotional labour that queer aunties do for their kin. This article thus explores the aunty-niec…
Grindr is basically interactive porn’: Ethnographic observations from Kolkata on queer intimacies and ‘pic exchange’ on Grindr and PlanetRomeo
Viral Assemblages and Witnessing Extraordinary Times: Queer Patchworks of Intimacy, Precarity and Affect in an Indian City
This article is based on ethnographic field work conducted in Kolkata during 2019–2021 with queer and trans people during the COVID pandemic. This article develops a new framework of queer patchworks and discusses the various ways through which queer and trans communities are navigating survival during these non-normative times. This paper particularly responds to how digital media is being used by individuals and organisations as a form of witne…
Joyraj and Debanuj: Queer(y)ing the city
In this article we want to evoke two characters that each suggest different points of departure for thinking about Kolkata as a queer kind of space. By this we want to evoke something of the sexual geography and life-ways of the city, but to go beyond this standpoint too, to question ways in which ethnographic characters might be evoked in respect of any context, Kolkata or elsewhere. In one sense this is to open out a perception of Kolkata as a …
Queering Digital India: Activisms, Identities, Subjectivities
Chapter 1 Introduction: Queering Digital India
Intimate Subjects and Virtual Spaces: Rethinking Sexuality as a Category for Intimate Ethnographies
Social networking sites and digital technologies have created opportunities for young people in India to establish virtual intimate connections. In this article, the authors analyze the intimate exchanges between young men on two different digital platforms – Facebook and Planet Romeo. An analysis of the intimate virtual exchanges reveals technologies of queer neoliberal subject formation within contemporary India. Queer neoliberal subject format…
Opening closets and dividing audiences: Rituparno Ghosh, the queer star of Bengali cinema
This article explores the Bengali auteur Rituparno Ghosh’s queer stardom. Through an exploration of his key films, writings, and television appearances we establish his socio-political significance in Bengal and beyond. We contextualise Ghosh’s work within the changing media landscape in West Bengal. The emergence of new satellite channels, print media, and corporate funding transformed Ghosh’s media presence and consolidated his position in the …
Ambalavaner Sivanandan and Black Politics in Britain
This article looks at the contribution made by Ambalavaner Sivanandan to black politics and organising in Britain. It reviews some of his most important writings and analyses their significance and influence on black activism and race studies. Specifically, the article looks at the ways in which class and race intersected in his work and his critical stance towards political elites and advocacy for radical politics
Game of Thrones in India: Of Piracy, Queer Intimacies and Viral Memes
Urban Utopias: Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal South Asia
From Teen Kanya to Arshinagar: Feminist politics, Bengali high culture and the stardom of Aparna Sen
This paper makes an attempt to understand the stardom of the Bengali film-maker and actor Aparna Sen, who has been associated with the industry for 55 years. We argue that Sen’s star persona is based on a polysemic structure, to borrow Richard Dyer’s term, which comes from the multiple roles she has played in her career. Achieving a local stardom through her work as an actor in Bengali popular cinema, she went on to acquire international fame thr…
Townsend Middleton. The Demands of Recognition: State Anthropology and Ethnopolitics in Darjeeling; Megha Kumar. Communalism and Sexual Violence in India: The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity and Conflic…
Digital Queer Cultures in India: Politics, Intimacies and Belonging
Sexuality in India offers an expression of nationalist anxieties and is a significant marker of modernity through which subjectivities are formed among the middle class. This book investigates the everyday experience of queer Indian men on digital spaces. It explores how queer identities are formed in virtual spaces and how the existence of such spaces challenge and critique ‘Indian’-ness. It also looks at the role of class and intimacy within th…
Grindr is basically interactive porn’: Ethnographic observations from Kolkata on queer intimacies and ‘pic exchange’ on Grindr and PlanetRomeo
From Scene to Screen: The challenges and opportunities of commercial digital platforms for HIV community outreach
This article draws upon data from Reaching Out Online, a collaborative research project that explored the need for, and development of, a digital health outreach service for gay, bisexual men and men who have sex with men (MSM) in London and Brighton, United Kingdom. It identifies the challenges that commercial hook-up apps and other digitally based dating and sex services pose for conventional forms of gay men's health promotion. It then moves t…
Articulating Dissident Citizenship, Belonging, and Queerness on Cyberspace
On December 11, 2013, the Indian Supreme Court reinstated Section 377, which criminalizes sexual acts “against the order of nature.” This article is a meditation on the acts of individual and collective resistance undertaken by dissident citizens (Sparks) in order to challenge and articulate strategies to intervene and critique the State and civil society's role in this decision. Activism is the study of the relationship between the virtual and t…
The cultural industries of India: An introduction
No abstract available
Opening closets and dividing audiences: Rituparno Ghosh, the queer star of Bengali cinema
This article explores the Bengali auteur Rituparno Ghosh’s queer stardom. Through an exploration of his key films, writings, and television appearances we establish his socio-political significance in Bengal and beyond. We contextualise Ghosh’s work within the changing media landscape in West Bengal. The emergence of new satellite channels, print media, and corporate funding transformed Ghosh’s media presence and consolidated his position in the …
Launda Dancers: The Dancing Boys of India
The tradition of men dancing in place of women (launda naach) has a chequered history in India. The dancers mostly come from poor families with a disproportionate number from West Bengal. They face significant violence, both at home and in their profession, for so much of identity in India is centred round the family and appropriate roles within the family. Launda naach offers a certain freedom as well as a measure of economic Independence. But i…
Human Values in Management
The essay begins by the author's recollections of his younger days when people were seldom worried about moral decline in society. Today, however, it has become a real concern. Literature, philosophy, spiritual works are all essentially a celebration of human values. The paper examines the issue of scale of graded values as against that of absolutist universal values. A scrutiny of English literature reveals that some key literary figures in eigh…
Consuming and retailing fashion: South Asian diaspora negotiating clothing practices, identities and community making in Glasgow
This article explores South Asian diasporic fashion retail spaces and sartorial practices in Glasgow. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic research, it investigates how fashion and clothing contribute to identity construction, community building, and cultural blending among British South Asians. Utilising patchwork ethnography and city walking, the article presents the lived experiences of shopkeepers and consumers, demonstrating the interplay o…
Mourning a Queer Aunty: Kinship, Creative Resilience and World-Making
Indian queer and trans activist Agniva passed away in 2016. This article draws on memoir, anecdote, research interviews and digital ethnography to explore the impact that Agniva had on a range of queer and trans people. The author details experiences he shared with Agniva and analyses virtual memorials and obituaries for her in order to account for the emotional labour that queer aunties do for their kin. This article thus explores the aunty-niec…
Media and Citizenship in India: Heteronomy and Autonomy in the Indian Journalistic Field
Since 2014, India has experienced a shift towards a new phase of democracy, often described as an “ethnic democracy.” Political theorists argue that this phase promotes a Hindu conception of the nation, contrasting with the secularism embedded in the Indian Constitution, and is marked by attacks on ethnic and religious minorities, particularly Muslims. Some media scholars suggest that controlling mass media has been a crucial strategy in generati…
Queer Politics in Times of New Authoritarianisms
Across South Asia and the world, new authoritarianisms in the last two decades have reignited old fault lines around sexuality. This introduction examines how different states, laws and communities have engaged with queer rights discourse with a range of outcomes. It argues that despite a spate of recent progressive legislations, there is no direct correlation between LGBTQI+ rights and liberal governance in South Asia. Framing contributions that…
Queer creative Indian city: Queer film festivals, precarious cultural work and community making in Kolkata
In this article, we offer a new concept of the “queer creative city”, through a critical examination of how a regional queer Bengali film culture has emerged in Kolkata as a result of the convergence of certain urban policies, queer political organising and cultural activism.We explore two queer film festivals in Kolkata – the Siddharth Gautam Film Festival and Dialogues, both having a very significant impact in transforming LGBTQ + lives in Kolk…
Viral Assemblages and Witnessing Extraordinary Times: Queer Patchworks of Intimacy, Precarity and Affect in an Indian City
This article is based on ethnographic field work conducted in Kolkata during 2019–2021 with queer and trans people during the COVID pandemic. This article develops a new framework of queer patchworks and discusses the various ways through which queer and trans communities are navigating survival during these non-normative times. This paper particularly responds to how digital media is being used by individuals and organisations as a form of witne…
Joyraj and Debanuj: Queer(y)ing the city
In this article we want to evoke two characters that each suggest different points of departure for thinking about Kolkata as a queer kind of space. By this we want to evoke something of the sexual geography and life-ways of the city, but to go beyond this standpoint too, to question ways in which ethnographic characters might be evoked in respect of any context, Kolkata or elsewhere. In one sense this is to open out a perception of Kolkata as a …
Contemporary South Asian youth cultures and the fashion landscape
In this article we reflect on the timely dialogue which took place to address how economic growth and the expanding middle-class youth population in South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) influences sartorial identities. This working note is based on an ongoing research project: ‘South Asian Youth Cultures and Fashion’ and the related symposium at the London College of Fashion, which explores …
India: Language Issues N.K. Prasad: The Language Issue in India. Leeladevi Publicatons, Delhi, 1979, 126p., Rs. 45
India: Bhabani Bhattacharya: Socio-Political Currents in Bengal: A Nineteenth Century Perspective. Vikas Publishing House, Ghaziabad, 1980, 147p., Rs. 60
Human Values in Management
The essay begins by the author's recollections of his younger days when people were seldom worried about moral decline in society. Today, however, it has become a real concern. Literature, philosophy, spiritual works are all essentially a celebration of human values. The paper examines the issue of scale of graded values as against that of absolutist universal values. A scrutiny of English literature reveals that some key literary figures in eigh…
The Politics of Postcolonialism: Empire, Nation and Resistance & Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies
Rumina Sethi. The Politics of Postcolonialism: Empire, Nation and Resistance . Pluto Press, London, 2011. pp. ix + 181. Notes. Bibliog. Index. Hb. £60. ISBN 9 7807 4532 3640. Pb. £17.99. ISBN 9 780
Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History: Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947–1965
Niraja Gopal Jayal's book, Citizenship and its Discontents, breaks new ground as it writes a history of citizenship in one of the largest democracies in the world – India. As the author explains
South Asian Feminisms
Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose (eds). South Asian Feminisms . Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2012. pp. vii + 422. Notes. Bibliog. Index. Pb. £18.99/ $27.95. ISBN 9 7808 2235 1795 Ania Loomba n
Launda Dancers: The Dancing Boys of India
The tradition of men dancing in place of women (launda naach) has a chequered history in India. The dancers mostly come from poor families with a disproportionate number from West Bengal. They face significant violence, both at home and in their profession, for so much of identity in India is centred round the family and appropriate roles within the family. Launda naach offers a certain freedom as well as a measure of economic Independence. But i…
Parties, Advocacy and Activism: Interrogating Community and Class in Digital Queer India
New media and the internet have had a significant impact on the queer community in India. From cyber-activism challenging media and political discourses on queer identity to providing a social space for interaction and dialogue (Roy 2003; Shahani 2008), they have been instrumental in the growth of the ‘marginalized’ queer community in the country. This chapter draws on and develops research on online queer communities (Campbell 2004; Mowlabocus 2…
Parties, Advocacy and Activism
Articulating Dissident Citizenship, Belonging, and Queerness on Cyberspace
On December 11, 2013, the Indian Supreme Court reinstated Section 377, which criminalizes sexual acts “against the order of nature.” This article is a meditation on the acts of individual and collective resistance undertaken by dissident citizens (Sparks) in order to challenge and articulate strategies to intervene and critique the State and civil society's role in this decision. Activism is the study of the relationship between the virtual and t…
Contemporary South Asian youth cultures and the fashion landscape
In this article we reflect on the timely dialogue which took place to address how economic growth and the expanding middle-class youth population in South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) influences sartorial identities. This working note is based on an ongoing research project: ‘South Asian Youth Cultures and Fashion’ and the related symposium at the London College of Fashion, which explores …
The world of Rituparno Ghosh: Texts, contexts and transgressions
In this article we introduce the queer Bengali auteur Rituparno Ghosh (1961–2013), who had a significant role in reviving the Bengali film industry that was going through a dark phase for a little more than a decade. As an iconic feminist film-maker and queer cultural figure, Ghosh has been an influential icon within Bengal and more widely in India and the diasporas. In seeking to examine his vast oeuvre of work we focus on its various elements. …
Anna Morcom. Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion; Subhadra Mitra Channa. Gender in South Asia: Social Imagination and Constructed Realities
The University will be the battleground for freedom’: Solidarity and diaspora organising in London
The recent stand-off between the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University and the government of India is unlike any of the more recent campus-based protests and student agitation movements that have been taking place around the country. 1 Much of the media coverage has centred around the arrest of the JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar on 12 February 2016 followed by the arrests of Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya.All three arrests were made on th…
From Scene to Screen: The challenges and opportunities of commercial digital platforms for HIV community outreach
This article draws upon data from Reaching Out Online, a collaborative research project that explored the need for, and development of, a digital health outreach service for gay, bisexual men and men who have sex with men (MSM) in London and Brighton, United Kingdom. It identifies the challenges that commercial hook-up apps and other digitally based dating and sex services pose for conventional forms of gay men's health promotion. It then moves t…
Remembering Benedict Anderson and his Influence on South Asian Studies
This article was written shortly after the death of Benedict Anderson. It contextualizes Anderson's contribution to studies of nationalism and the Global South, particularly Asia. It then revisits some of the key debates of Anderson's scholarship and its particular significance and importance to the study of South Asia
Game of Thrones in India: Of Piracy, Queer Intimacies and Viral Memes
Urban Utopias: Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal South Asia
From Teen Kanya to Arshinagar: Feminist politics, Bengali high culture and the stardom of Aparna Sen
This paper makes an attempt to understand the stardom of the Bengali film-maker and actor Aparna Sen, who has been associated with the industry for 55 years. We argue that Sen’s star persona is based on a polysemic structure, to borrow Richard Dyer’s term, which comes from the multiple roles she has played in her career. Achieving a local stardom through her work as an actor in Bengali popular cinema, she went on to acquire international fame thr…
Townsend Middleton. The Demands of Recognition: State Anthropology and Ethnopolitics in Darjeeling; Megha Kumar. Communalism and Sexual Violence in India: The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity and Conflic…
Digital Queer Cultures in India: Politics, Intimacies and Belonging
Sexuality in India offers an expression of nationalist anxieties and is a significant marker of modernity through which subjectivities are formed among the middle class. This book investigates the everyday experience of queer Indian men on digital spaces. It explores how queer identities are formed in virtual spaces and how the existence of such spaces challenge and critique ‘Indian’-ness. It also looks at the role of class and intimacy within th…
Queering Digital India: Activisms, Identities, Subjectivities
Chapter 1 Introduction: Queering Digital India
Intimate Subjects and Virtual Spaces: Rethinking Sexuality as a Category for Intimate Ethnographies
Social networking sites and digital technologies have created opportunities for young people in India to establish virtual intimate connections. In this article, the authors analyze the intimate exchanges between young men on two different digital platforms – Facebook and Planet Romeo. An analysis of the intimate virtual exchanges reveals technologies of queer neoliberal subject formation within contemporary India. Queer neoliberal subject format…
Opening closets and dividing audiences: Rituparno Ghosh, the queer star of Bengali cinema
This article explores the Bengali auteur Rituparno Ghosh’s queer stardom. Through an exploration of his key films, writings, and television appearances we establish his socio-political significance in Bengal and beyond. We contextualise Ghosh’s work within the changing media landscape in West Bengal. The emergence of new satellite channels, print media, and corporate funding transformed Ghosh’s media presence and consolidated his position in the …
Sociology (35 works) · Political science (28 works) · Gender Studies (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (22 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · South Asian Cinema and Culture (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Queer (15 works) · Aesthetics (14 works)