B Bagchi
Biographic Data
| ID | 38021 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Bagchi |
| GIVEN NAMES | B |
| FAMILY NAME | Bagchi |
| SIGNATURE | BAGCHI B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0230-4716 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Ageing in Indian higher education: Analysing narratives of post-Independence women writers, educators, and academics
Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity
Suparno Banerjee’s monograph examines science fiction (henceforth SF) from India, a country that has a rich and fascinating tradition of SF. This is a book that will be of interest and value to scholars and students in higher education of utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction, and to readers across disciplines interested in SF as a mode. It is quite clear today that Darko Suvin’s canonical definition of SF as cognitive estrangement, an interp…
South Asia
Modern Indian Utopian Art and Literature: An Introduction
This is an editorial introduction to the Open Library of Humanities Special Collection on Utopian Art and Literature from Modern India, which has a major focus on literary and filmic imaginings of utopia and dystopia, with the majority of articles examining texts from the period before the Partition and independence of India in 1947. We show how the collection is part of the current scholarly endeavour to recognize the wealth of non-Eurocentric u…
Transcultural Utopian Imagination and the Future: Tagore, Gandhi, Andrews, and India–Britain Entanglements in the Early 1930s
This article focuses on the transcultural utopian imaginings of futures in early twentieth-century India and Britain, with Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, anticolonial politician M. K. Gandhi, and British Christian activist C. F. Andrews at the center. Homing in on two trips made to England by Tagore (1930) and Gandhi (1931), especially their visits to Woodbrooke Quaker College in Birmingham, and on Gandhi’s visit to Lancashire, the article show…
Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony
The book under review examines how a number of key literary and cultural texts, spanning the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, from Britain and India (mainly Bengal), imagined the world after decolonization. The book, by an academic working in English and South Asian literary studies, uses literary and cultural geographical approaches, grounded in cultural and historical materialism. It also makes a fresh contribution to utopian studie…
Remobilizing Religion in Utopian Studies: A View from a Feminist Literary and Historical Scholar of Utopia
This article explores how factors such as gender and cross-religious communication frame and yield utopian perspectives in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's literature and practice as educator and feminist. The article makes the case that Hossain's body of work envisions utopia in complex, many-layered ways. Early in her creative career, as a member of the Muslim youth herself, Hossain created gender-just utopian visions that also embedded cross-religiou…
B en C onisbee B aer . Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism
Ben Conisbee Baer’s Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism takes schooling and educative formation in the larger sense as key processes in modern subject formation, examining how writers and intellectuals from mainly Africa, Asia, and the Americas reimagined how the people of their countries might be educated and how they might participate in the making of a nonimperial world during the interwar period. …
Speculating with human rights: Two South Asian women writers and utopian mobilities
Utopian and dystopian fiction are classifiable under the umbrella term speculative fiction, which speculates with or takes risks with the reality it creates in the fiction. My paper investigates speculative writing which is also utopian by South Asian feminist and activist women, comparing creative texts by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, from the first half of the 20th century, and Vandana Singh, from contemporary times. A selection of their published …
Tracing two generations in twentieth century Indian women's education through analysis of literary sources: Selected writings by Padmini Sengupta
This article uses literary sources written by Padmini Sengupta, 1906–1988 (daughter of Kamala Satthinadhan, 1880–1950, educator, writer, and editor of the Indian Ladies’ Magazine) to map two generations of women in India from reformist backgrounds and their education and writing. Padmini's biography of her mother, The Portrait of an Indian Woman, 1956, is analyzed at length. Here, Sengupta offers at once a memoir of her own growing years and a bi…
Satinath Bhaduri’s Bengali Novels Jagari (The Vigil) and Dhorai Charit Manas as Utopian Literature
This article analyses two novels in Bengali by Satinath Bhaduri, Jagari (1946, translated into English as The Vigil ) and Dhorai Charit Manas (1949–51, translated into English as Dhorai Charit Manas ). It analyses them as examples of vernacular Indian utopian literature, with specific reference to competing visions of utopia as crystallized in the anti-colonial Quit India Movement in India and to Gandhian notions of utopia. Neither of these novel…
Ār konakhāne / ‘Somewhere Else’: Utopian Resonances in Lila Majumdar’s Autobiographical Writing
This article examines the autobiographical writings of Lila Majumdar, 1908–2007, a writer most famous for zany, fantastical, defamiliarizing, speculative fiction for children and young adults. Majumdar was an influential maker of cultural history. While her natal Ray/Raychaudhuri family comprised master entertainers who simultaneously brought reformist, innovative values into the public sphere of the arts, the leading woman writer from this milie…
Crooked lines: Utopia, human rights and South Asian women's writing and agency
My article focuses on the relationship between human rights and utopia with special focus on South Asia and women's writing and agency. Utopia offers possibilities to capture, in writing and practice, the impossible good place. Utopia has the dimension of the anticipatory consciousness, but also the impulse to narrativise that not-yet. Human rights too have a dual impulse of a strong drive to articulate a desired set of norms, while knowing that …
Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Maldives, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka: the sovereign nation-states of present-day South Asia encompass huge diversities, but one of the key elements they have in common is the fact that the majority of the population of this region lives in villages even today. Anupama Mohan has written a lively book with a focus on the utopian imaginative mode and the representation of the village in South Asia…
Connected and entangled histories: Writing histories of education in the Indian context
This article examines contestations and recent trend-setting approaches in the historiography of education in India in the post-1800 period. British colonialism created a huge rupture in South Asian society as regards the provision of education. Historians of education have asked what sorts of indigenous educational institutions and methods were present in pre-colonial India: in this context, the article discusses the work of historians who resea…
Writing Educational Spaces in Twentieth -Century Reformist Indian Discourse
This paper analyses discourse and practice around educational spaces in twentieth-century India, with attention to notions of region, nation, and the international, and a concurrent focus on the gendering of such spaces. The actors and writings examined were important shaping presences in the reformist/ progressive educational field of that time and place. By reformist or progressive education, I refer to theories and practices of education that …
Two Lives: Voices, resources, and networks in the history of female education in Bengal and South Asia
This article focuses on the lives of two women active in furthering female education in Bengal in colonial India, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Priyabala Gupta. It analyses the life‐histories of oppressed women in Rokeya’s novella, Padmarag (1924), as well as biographical material in Bengali on Rokeya by two younger friends and activists. Priyabala’s autobiography, published posthumously from the manuscript by feminist academics, is also analysed. …
Towards Ladyland: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and the movement for women's education in Bengal, c . 1900– c . 1932
This paper analyses the work of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932), urban Bengali Muslim educator and writer, placing her in the wider context of women organising themselves in associations to create social change through education for women, in the province of undivided Bengal in colonial India, from c. 1900 to c. 1932. A subject of the British Indian Empire, Rokeya, and many of her colleagues, wrote back to the empire against both colonialism …
Utopies féministes et expérimentations urbaines
Les villes modernes sont en apparence des lieux de liberté, de mixité que chacun utilise à sa guise. Les projets de ville sont projets de vie meilleure, voire de société nouvelle, souvent d'égalité. Pourtant l'étude de leurs fondements historiques, de leurs évolutions, de leurs projets politiques montre que, tout en étant créatrices de pratiques nouvelle et porteuses d'innovation, les villes sont fondamentalement le reflet des normes sociales dom…
Towards Ladyland: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and the movement for women's education in Bengal, c . 1900– c . 1932
This paper analyses the work of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932), urban Bengali Muslim educator and writer, placing her in the wider context of women organising themselves in associations to create social change through education for women, in the province of undivided Bengal in colonial India, from c. 1900 to c. 1932. A subject of the British Indian Empire, Rokeya, and many of her colleagues, wrote back to the empire against both colonialism …
Connected and entangled histories: Writing histories of education in the Indian context
This article examines contestations and recent trend-setting approaches in the historiography of education in India in the post-1800 period. British colonialism created a huge rupture in South Asian society as regards the provision of education. Historians of education have asked what sorts of indigenous educational institutions and methods were present in pre-colonial India: in this context, the article discusses the work of historians who resea…
Speculating with human rights: Two South Asian women writers and utopian mobilities
Utopian and dystopian fiction are classifiable under the umbrella term speculative fiction, which speculates with or takes risks with the reality it creates in the fiction. My paper investigates speculative writing which is also utopian by South Asian feminist and activist women, comparing creative texts by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, from the first half of the 20th century, and Vandana Singh, from contemporary times. A selection of their published …
Crooked lines: Utopia, human rights and South Asian women's writing and agency
My article focuses on the relationship between human rights and utopia with special focus on South Asia and women's writing and agency. Utopia offers possibilities to capture, in writing and practice, the impossible good place. Utopia has the dimension of the anticipatory consciousness, but also the impulse to narrativise that not-yet. Human rights too have a dual impulse of a strong drive to articulate a desired set of norms, while knowing that …
Two Lives: Voices, resources, and networks in the history of female education in Bengal and South Asia
This article focuses on the lives of two women active in furthering female education in Bengal in colonial India, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Priyabala Gupta. It analyses the life‐histories of oppressed women in Rokeya’s novella, Padmarag (1924), as well as biographical material in Bengali on Rokeya by two younger friends and activists. Priyabala’s autobiography, published posthumously from the manuscript by feminist academics, is also analysed. …
Utopies féministes et expérimentations urbaines
Les villes modernes sont en apparence des lieux de liberté, de mixité que chacun utilise à sa guise. Les projets de ville sont projets de vie meilleure, voire de société nouvelle, souvent d'égalité. Pourtant l'étude de leurs fondements historiques, de leurs évolutions, de leurs projets politiques montre que, tout en étant créatrices de pratiques nouvelle et porteuses d'innovation, les villes sont fondamentalement le reflet des normes sociales dom…
Towards Ladyland: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and the movement for women's education in Bengal, c . 1900– c . 1932
This paper analyses the work of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932), urban Bengali Muslim educator and writer, placing her in the wider context of women organising themselves in associations to create social change through education for women, in the province of undivided Bengal in colonial India, from c. 1900 to c. 1932. A subject of the British Indian Empire, Rokeya, and many of her colleagues, wrote back to the empire against both colonialism …
Two Lives: Voices, resources, and networks in the history of female education in Bengal and South Asia
This article focuses on the lives of two women active in furthering female education in Bengal in colonial India, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Priyabala Gupta. It analyses the life‐histories of oppressed women in Rokeya’s novella, Padmarag (1924), as well as biographical material in Bengali on Rokeya by two younger friends and activists. Priyabala’s autobiography, published posthumously from the manuscript by feminist academics, is also analysed. …
Writing Educational Spaces in Twentieth -Century Reformist Indian Discourse
This paper analyses discourse and practice around educational spaces in twentieth-century India, with attention to notions of region, nation, and the international, and a concurrent focus on the gendering of such spaces. The actors and writings examined were important shaping presences in the reformist/ progressive educational field of that time and place. By reformist or progressive education, I refer to theories and practices of education that …
Connected and entangled histories: Writing histories of education in the Indian context
This article examines contestations and recent trend-setting approaches in the historiography of education in India in the post-1800 period. British colonialism created a huge rupture in South Asian society as regards the provision of education. Historians of education have asked what sorts of indigenous educational institutions and methods were present in pre-colonial India: in this context, the article discusses the work of historians who resea…
Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Maldives, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka: the sovereign nation-states of present-day South Asia encompass huge diversities, but one of the key elements they have in common is the fact that the majority of the population of this region lives in villages even today. Anupama Mohan has written a lively book with a focus on the utopian imaginative mode and the representation of the village in South Asia…
Crooked lines: Utopia, human rights and South Asian women's writing and agency
My article focuses on the relationship between human rights and utopia with special focus on South Asia and women's writing and agency. Utopia offers possibilities to capture, in writing and practice, the impossible good place. Utopia has the dimension of the anticipatory consciousness, but also the impulse to narrativise that not-yet. Human rights too have a dual impulse of a strong drive to articulate a desired set of norms, while knowing that …
Ār konakhāne / ‘Somewhere Else’: Utopian Resonances in Lila Majumdar’s Autobiographical Writing
This article examines the autobiographical writings of Lila Majumdar, 1908–2007, a writer most famous for zany, fantastical, defamiliarizing, speculative fiction for children and young adults. Majumdar was an influential maker of cultural history. While her natal Ray/Raychaudhuri family comprised master entertainers who simultaneously brought reformist, innovative values into the public sphere of the arts, the leading woman writer from this milie…
Satinath Bhaduri’s Bengali Novels Jagari (The Vigil) and Dhorai Charit Manas as Utopian Literature
This article analyses two novels in Bengali by Satinath Bhaduri, Jagari (1946, translated into English as The Vigil ) and Dhorai Charit Manas (1949–51, translated into English as Dhorai Charit Manas ). It analyses them as examples of vernacular Indian utopian literature, with specific reference to competing visions of utopia as crystallized in the anti-colonial Quit India Movement in India and to Gandhian notions of utopia. Neither of these novel…
Speculating with human rights: Two South Asian women writers and utopian mobilities
Utopian and dystopian fiction are classifiable under the umbrella term speculative fiction, which speculates with or takes risks with the reality it creates in the fiction. My paper investigates speculative writing which is also utopian by South Asian feminist and activist women, comparing creative texts by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, from the first half of the 20th century, and Vandana Singh, from contemporary times. A selection of their published …
Tracing two generations in twentieth century Indian women's education through analysis of literary sources: Selected writings by Padmini Sengupta
This article uses literary sources written by Padmini Sengupta, 1906–1988 (daughter of Kamala Satthinadhan, 1880–1950, educator, writer, and editor of the Indian Ladies’ Magazine) to map two generations of women in India from reformist backgrounds and their education and writing. Padmini's biography of her mother, The Portrait of an Indian Woman, 1956, is analyzed at length. Here, Sengupta offers at once a memoir of her own growing years and a bi…
B en C onisbee B aer . Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism
Ben Conisbee Baer’s Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism takes schooling and educative formation in the larger sense as key processes in modern subject formation, examining how writers and intellectuals from mainly Africa, Asia, and the Americas reimagined how the people of their countries might be educated and how they might participate in the making of a nonimperial world during the interwar period. …
South Asia
Modern Indian Utopian Art and Literature: An Introduction
This is an editorial introduction to the Open Library of Humanities Special Collection on Utopian Art and Literature from Modern India, which has a major focus on literary and filmic imaginings of utopia and dystopia, with the majority of articles examining texts from the period before the Partition and independence of India in 1947. We show how the collection is part of the current scholarly endeavour to recognize the wealth of non-Eurocentric u…
Transcultural Utopian Imagination and the Future: Tagore, Gandhi, Andrews, and India–Britain Entanglements in the Early 1930s
This article focuses on the transcultural utopian imaginings of futures in early twentieth-century India and Britain, with Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, anticolonial politician M. K. Gandhi, and British Christian activist C. F. Andrews at the center. Homing in on two trips made to England by Tagore (1930) and Gandhi (1931), especially their visits to Woodbrooke Quaker College in Birmingham, and on Gandhi’s visit to Lancashire, the article show…
Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony
The book under review examines how a number of key literary and cultural texts, spanning the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, from Britain and India (mainly Bengal), imagined the world after decolonization. The book, by an academic working in English and South Asian literary studies, uses literary and cultural geographical approaches, grounded in cultural and historical materialism. It also makes a fresh contribution to utopian studie…
Remobilizing Religion in Utopian Studies: A View from a Feminist Literary and Historical Scholar of Utopia
This article explores how factors such as gender and cross-religious communication frame and yield utopian perspectives in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's literature and practice as educator and feminist. The article makes the case that Hossain's body of work envisions utopia in complex, many-layered ways. Early in her creative career, as a member of the Muslim youth herself, Hossain created gender-just utopian visions that also embedded cross-religiou…
Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity
Suparno Banerjee’s monograph examines science fiction (henceforth SF) from India, a country that has a rich and fascinating tradition of SF. This is a book that will be of interest and value to scholars and students in higher education of utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction, and to readers across disciplines interested in SF as a mode. It is quite clear today that Darko Suvin’s canonical definition of SF as cognitive estrangement, an interp…
Ageing in Indian higher education: Analysing narratives of post-Independence women writers, educators, and academics
Sociology (15 works) · History (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Art history (8 works) · Utopia (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Literature (7 works)