A Ray
Biographic Data
| ID | 5186 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Ray |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Ray |
| SIGNATURE | RAY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Institute Of Technology Silchar |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9043-7825 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Performing withdrawal
Narrating the “Indian Origin”
This paper examines how museological curation, understood as a historically contingent regime of knowledge production, mediates the racialization of Roma identity through the “Indian origin” theory. Focusing on the Museum of Romani Culture, a state‐subsidized organization, Czech Republic (MRC), and its permanent exhibition The Story of the Roma , I analyze how the chronicling, mapping, and visual narration of the Roma's putative Indian heritage a…
Weaponizing effeminacy
This paper examines the queer digital persona of Sandy Saha, a Bengali content creator and reality television figure, as a critical intervention in the gendered politics of regional identity in the Global South. Known for flamboyant viral digital content, Saha performs exaggerated femininity, outrageous humour, and gender-bending appearances that generate mass popularity while provoking backlash. The paper situates Saha within a genealogy of cont…
Reassembling third places
This article explores how café spaces in post-pandemic Kolkata were reconfigured as affective infrastructures and contested third places in response to COVID-19 disruptions. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with café owners, staff, and managers, it traces the sensory, spatial, and emotional adaptations that reshaped everyday café life. The analysis moves across global chains and hyperlocal establishments to examine how pandemic protocols transf…
Vietfuckin’- nam !”
Within dominant Orientalist frameworks, Vietnam continues to circulate in Western cultural imaginaries largely through cinematic representations of the Vietnam War. These films have long reinforced frontier myths and racialized narratives of conflict, yet scholarly attention has focused primarily on war, trauma, and geopolitics, leaving underexplored the ways such representations shape sexualized imaginaries of Vietnam as a tourist destination. T…
Informality and the paradox of legal subjecthood
Hero Alom and the politics of cringe
This paper examines the digital reception of Bangladeshi internet celebrity Hero Alom to explore how the discourse of ‘cringe’ operates as a gatekeeping mechanism within contemporary Bengali networked publics. While Alom is routinely mocked for his low-budget music videos and perceived lack of aesthetic sophistication, the intensity and consistency of this mockery reflect deeper anxieties around class, masculinity, and cultural legitimacy. Situat…
From an ‘organic city’ to a ‘commercial hub
In India, economic liberalization, which began in the early 1990s, marked a pivotal shift from the Nehruvian model of a planned economy to a market‐oriented economy, which transformed the Indian middle‐class in both size and socioeconomic aspirations; and by extension, the texture of the urban form. In this paper, we focus on Rajarhat – a rapidly developing township located in the eastern fringe of the metropolitan city of Kolkata – as a case stu…
Reclaiming Rajarhat
The rapid development of Rajarhat, West Bengal into a ‘global city’ has attracted both skilled and unskilled migrants. Amidst economic precarity and social polarisation, ethnicity-based identity politics are easily weaponised by a section of the Bengali population, in order to deflect public attention away from the political economy and towards those perceived as ‘outsiders’ – an empty signifier that refers to ethnic, religious and linguistic min…
Food Evidence from a Nineteenth-Century Kitchen House in Charleston, South Carolina
A two-story kitchen house located at 51 Meeting Street, downtown Charleston, was a place of food preparation and cooking during the 19th century. From 1808 to 1865, enslaved cooks worked long hours creating meals for the many people who resided on this urban lot. A useful approach to understanding the complexities of enslaved people’s daily lives is through the study of organic materials preserved inside the walls of standing historical structure…
Pedagogic insularities and fragmented identities
Amid the increasing bureaucratisation of Indian universities, this article examines the evolving pedagogical implications, including the challenges of syllabus design and the growing bureaucratic interference in classroom practices. Drawing on Edward Said's notion of humanism, it interrogates the concept of the ‘differentiated human’ – fragmented and discrete identities that lack common ground for meaningful dialogue, a phenomenon that is deeply …
The emergence of Bengali Dalit literature
The Toto as an "ecological alternative" in Rajarhat
Don't take too many pictures
This article draws on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in Rajarhat, a planned township on Kolkata's urban fringe, to develop what we term an "epistemology of discomfort". Rajarhat, often portrayed as a frontier of neoliberal urbanism, is shaped equally by speculative real estate, displacement, and precarious inhabitation. As researchers situated within caste, class, and institutional privilege, we encountered discomfort-not despite our pos…
Modern day Kolkata and mimicry of England
This paper explores the phenomenon of colonial nostalgia among middle-class and lower-middle-class residents in Kolkata and its surrounding suburbs – groups often overlooked in dominant discussions of postcolonial memory and urban identity. While nostalgia for the British Raj is typically associated with elites or nationalist critique, this study reveals how individuals with limited access to Anglophone cultural capital also express a complex lon…
Networked mobility and temporal spaces
The locus of Buddhist pedagogy and decolonising the ‘Thai university’
The conjoint processes of nation-building and the construction of a homogenous national culture in Thailand have often leveraged Buddhism as a unifying force and cultural heritage of the Thai people. Owing to this, Buddhist pedagogy has been integrated into the Thai national curriculum, and accordingly, the modern Thai education system is steeped in Buddhist values. This is at odds with the modern-secular registers of pedagogy modelled after the …
The Shifting Contours of Nostalgia, Homelessness, and Homecoming
At the end of the Vietnam War, after the U.S. veterans returned to their homeland, they were rejected by their own society and hence experienced an inner state of homelessness. Having faced everyday humiliation and monotonous life in their homeland, they longed for Vietnam where they were once important and desired to return there as tourists now. In this journey of life, they turned out to be existential characters who embody the predicament of …
The constituency of Digital Humanities in India
Digital Humanities (DH), as an emergent field, is increasingly gaining traction within the Indian academe. It is credited with pumping fresh life into studying the Humanities at a time when the relevance of Humanities is being questioned. However, the role of the ‘digital’ in studying the Humanities – whether DH is an autonomous field, or merely a data-driven technique/application, or characterises new methodologies that equip us to probe into ne…
How can a small app piss off an entire country?”
In this paper, we employ “everyday techno-nationalism” as a critical lens to unpack the Indian government’s ban of TikTok in 2020. We focus on social media discussions of the ban on Quora and Reddit, and examine how TikTok is perceived as a “Chinese” platform as contrasted, but simultaneously integral, to a techno-nationalist imagination of “Indian-ness.” We put forward two arguments based on our findings. First, we suggest that TikTok’s “Chinese…
The episteme(s) around Roma historiography
Since the 18th century, scholars have been claiming that Romani people originated from India. Folkloristists, ethnographers, linguists and demographers alike have sought to identify, classify and characterize the ‘Roma traits’ and map them onto an imagined notion of Indian-hood. Meanwhile, India has reappropriated the originary claim and started to embrace the Roma community as one of their ‘own’. This paper focuses on the epistemic and political…
Probing ‘instaworthiness’
This article examines ‘instaworthiness’ as a classificatory category in discourses of place-making. It engages in social-semiotic analyses of the selfies clicked at instaworthy cafes and pubs in Kolkata to highlight how the photographic performativity of selfie-taking reconfigures the notions of placemaking. It accounts for: how is an ‘instaworthy’ spot made and consumed? What ramifications does showcasing the self within these specific sites hav…
Why the digital classroom is a bad model for digital learning
The pandemic has compelled educational institutes across the world to hastily adopt, adapt and cope with digital learning by developing ‘digital classrooms’, virtual learning environments replete with sophisticated technological features. The eagerness of the intent to ramp up technological infrastructures, however, is not reflected in the rethinking or redesigning of pedagogies for digital learning. Technocratic ambitions often have very little,…
A Phenomenological Analysis of Tourist Identity
There is a dearth of narrative research related to "tourist identity" in leisure and tourism studies. In this review paper, we identify this research gap upon performing a systematic review of articles in leisure and tourism studies published on the SCOPUS database in the last four decades (1979-2021). We furnish three theses based on the prevalent research gap and offer three propositions that foreground the questions of identity. We argue that …
Cultural Matrix of the Online Hindutva Discourse in India
The promise of ‘Digital India’ has, on the one hand, supplied a new vocabulary of political participation, and, on the other hand, consolidated techniques of statist control. Taking off from here, this article examines the constituency of the Hindutva discourse online, and how the performativity of Hindutva reconfigures the digital public sphere. It seeks to understand: How do the ideologues of Hindutva territorialize certain online spaces? How d…
The episteme(s) around Roma historiography
Since the 18th century, scholars have been claiming that Romani people originated from India. Folkloristists, ethnographers, linguists and demographers alike have sought to identify, classify and characterize the ‘Roma traits’ and map them onto an imagined notion of Indian-hood. Meanwhile, India has reappropriated the originary claim and started to embrace the Roma community as one of their ‘own’. This paper focuses on the epistemic and political…
Pan-Hindutva and the Discursive Practices of Digital (Counter)Publics around #SupportCAA 1
In December 2019, the Indian parliament implemented the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that gives non-Muslim immigrants from the neighboring countries an easy access to Indian citizenship. Across India, the CAA has garnered support and provoked protests in equal measure. This paper examines how #SupportCAA constantly negotiates between two parallel objectives: first, to achieve a pan-national unification of non-Muslim “Indians” (practically, Hin…
Pedagogic insularities and fragmented identities
Amid the increasing bureaucratisation of Indian universities, this article examines the evolving pedagogical implications, including the challenges of syllabus design and the growing bureaucratic interference in classroom practices. Drawing on Edward Said's notion of humanism, it interrogates the concept of the ‘differentiated human’ – fragmented and discrete identities that lack common ground for meaningful dialogue, a phenomenon that is deeply …
The Toto as an "ecological alternative" in Rajarhat
Post-memory and the third generation’s inheritance of the Indian partition (1947)
The experience of the Partition (1947)—the contexts of migration and the experience of refugeehood—in East-India is assumed to be different from that in the West. But, even after some 70 years after the Partition, there has been no substantial study on the difference in the ontology of refugeehood across the two sites. More to it, narratives from the North-east (Meghalaya, Assam, Tripura), which again differ significantly from their western India…
Remediation, virality and affect
On 2 September 2015, Alan Kurdi’s image went viral on the social media and immediately shook the world. This paper concerns not so much with the referent as with the capacity of image to represent. What in an image endows it the capacity to shame entire humanity, heterogeneous as it is? To further complicate, how does a digital image – a conglomeration of pixilated dots, devoid of any materiality whatsoever – in its singularity generate ‘affect’,…
Modern day Kolkata and mimicry of England
This paper explores the phenomenon of colonial nostalgia among middle-class and lower-middle-class residents in Kolkata and its surrounding suburbs – groups often overlooked in dominant discussions of postcolonial memory and urban identity. While nostalgia for the British Raj is typically associated with elites or nationalist critique, this study reveals how individuals with limited access to Anglophone cultural capital also express a complex lon…
The Shifting Contours of Nostalgia, Homelessness, and Homecoming
At the end of the Vietnam War, after the U.S. veterans returned to their homeland, they were rejected by their own society and hence experienced an inner state of homelessness. Having faced everyday humiliation and monotonous life in their homeland, they longed for Vietnam where they were once important and desired to return there as tourists now. In this journey of life, they turned out to be existential characters who embody the predicament of …
How can a small app piss off an entire country?”
In this paper, we employ “everyday techno-nationalism” as a critical lens to unpack the Indian government’s ban of TikTok in 2020. We focus on social media discussions of the ban on Quora and Reddit, and examine how TikTok is perceived as a “Chinese” platform as contrasted, but simultaneously integral, to a techno-nationalist imagination of “Indian-ness.” We put forward two arguments based on our findings. First, we suggest that TikTok’s “Chinese…
A Phenomenological Analysis of Tourist Identity
There is a dearth of narrative research related to "tourist identity" in leisure and tourism studies. In this review paper, we identify this research gap upon performing a systematic review of articles in leisure and tourism studies published on the SCOPUS database in the last four decades (1979-2021). We furnish three theses based on the prevalent research gap and offer three propositions that foreground the questions of identity. We argue that …
Cultural Matrix of the Online Hindutva Discourse in India
The promise of ‘Digital India’ has, on the one hand, supplied a new vocabulary of political participation, and, on the other hand, consolidated techniques of statist control. Taking off from here, this article examines the constituency of the Hindutva discourse online, and how the performativity of Hindutva reconfigures the digital public sphere. It seeks to understand: How do the ideologues of Hindutva territorialize certain online spaces? How d…
Of the (im)mobility regime in India
In this paper, we examine how the Indian welfare-capitalist state, in responding to the pandemic in diverse ways, has appealed to the ‘guilt conscience’ and played on the vexed positionality of the mobile elite, who following the pandemic, have to give up their freedom of mobility. We argue that the very condition of political legibility of the mobile subject is predicated upon the ethico-moral ideal of the ‘good citizen’, who, in the statist ima…
On the Spectacle of Walking
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, in the face of the 21-day nation-wide lockdown imposed in India since 22 March 2020, the migrant worker has become the focal point of public discourse. With public transports being cancelled and the inter-state borders sealed for public transportation, thousands of migrant workers -- particularly, from the national capital, New Delhi -- are literally walking hundreds of miles to travel to their homes. This article is a…
Human Values and the Legal Articulation of ‘Vagabond’
How law perceives the world is often grounded in systems of values and beliefs adopted by the legal practitioners: their interpretive frameworks, prejudices and dispositions, which shape the very ‘paradigms’ upon which they choose to see the ‘facts’ and frame their methods of inquiries. In other words, ‘truth’ in the eyes of the law is but ex post facto (re)construction of ‘reality’ achieved through narratorial articulation of relevant events and…
Lectures critiques
Distribution lectronique Cairn.info pour Presses de Sciences Po. Distribution lectronique Cairn.info pour Presses de Sciences Po. La reproduction ou reprsentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorise que dans les limites des conditions gnrales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas chant, des conditions gnrales de la licence souscrite par votre tablissement. Toute autre reproduction ou reprsentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque …
Tom Boland (2012). Critique As a Modern Social Phenomenon
The Making of the Modern Refugee by Peter Gatrell
Human Values and the Legal Articulation of ‘Vagabond’
How law perceives the world is often grounded in systems of values and beliefs adopted by the legal practitioners: their interpretive frameworks, prejudices and dispositions, which shape the very ‘paradigms’ upon which they choose to see the ‘facts’ and frame their methods of inquiries. In other words, ‘truth’ in the eyes of the law is but ex post facto (re)construction of ‘reality’ achieved through narratorial articulation of relevant events and…
On Knowledge Ecology
The Aesthetic Gaze
Indians have reportedly been traveling to Europe since the seventeenth century and narrativizing their travel accounts at least since the mid-eighteenth century. However, 'travelogue', what we know by European standards, as a genre in the Indian context is intrinsically linked with colonial exposure, the literary 'modernity' that purportedly ushered thereafter, and the high noon of Indian nationalism. Citing late nineteenth and early twentieth ce…
Is the university universalizable? A view from India
With the increasing formalization of knowledge, the ‘university’ as a pedagogic model has been naturalized by and within the paradigm of ‘modern’ (higher) education system. While the institutionalization of education is intrinsically linked with Western modernity, what the model has done ever since is astonishing in terms of the scale of social change it has ‘engineered’ and its impact on the deculturation of pedagogic cultures that existed outsi…
Vicissitudes of Reading the Mahabharata as History
One of the significant developments in contemporary Cultural Studies is the emergence of the concept of “modernities” in its multiple and vernacular iterations as opposed to “Modernity”, purportedly understood with reference to the epistemic legacies set forth by the Western frameworks. This article takes on Simonti Sen (2005) – who assumes colonialism to be a watershed that renders rupture between the “traditonal” and the “modern” – and demonstr…
Of nomadology
Despite the statist imagination of the ‘nomad’ pitted against an overtly instrumental understanding of space, ‘modern’ techniques of statist demographic control, and increasing surveillance on mobility, the trope of nomadology in the context of India often characterizes ‘the return of the repressed’. The Buddhists in the Ancient, the Bhakti–Sufi practitioners in the Medieval, and certain anti-imperialist ideologues in the Modern have perpetually …
Walking as a Metaphor
This article reflects on the dissenting act of mobility as articulated by migrant workers in India, who, during the nationwide lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, are walking back home, hundreds of miles away, in lieu of public transport. Their mobility—precisely, the act of walking—has thus acquired a metaphoric status, and laid bare the ideological practices of territorializing the city-space. This article argues that the migrant worker…
The "Vagabond" as a Nemesis of the Tourist
Zygmunt Bauman invokes the trope of vagrancy, wherein the "vagabonds" are squarely juxtaposed with the "tourists" who are, in sum, the global elite. For him, there are no vagabonds, they are only forced to be. This article questions Bauman's classificatory categories, his dualistic views, and the explanatory apparatus of the "voluntary-versus-involuntary travel." If "vagabond" de facto means involuntary traveler, where in Bauman's schema are we g…
The secular university in India and the discursive limits of liberalism
Through the process of colonization, the university has become the standard model for higher education in modern India. However, the normative status of the university and its emergence has come at the cost of deculturation of the vernacular pedagogic cultures that existed outside modern frameworks of knowledge. This is very pertinent in the case of India, where the whole paradigm of higher education has been derived from the Western model of uni…
Remediation, virality and affect
On 2 September 2015, Alan Kurdi’s image went viral on the social media and immediately shook the world. This paper concerns not so much with the referent as with the capacity of image to represent. What in an image endows it the capacity to shame entire humanity, heterogeneous as it is? To further complicate, how does a digital image – a conglomeration of pixilated dots, devoid of any materiality whatsoever – in its singularity generate ‘affect’,…
The Discursivity of the ‘Hindu’ Gaze
The ‘travelogue’ as a genre in late nineteenth-century India is intrinsically linked with colonial exposure, literary modernity and the ethos of a nascent Indian nationalism. This paper uses Bholanauth Chunder’s The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India (1869) as a case study to illustrate how travelling practices in colonial India were, among other things, aimed at achieving cultural proximity with the coloniser. It exam…
On the Spectacle of Walking
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, in the face of the 21-day nation-wide lockdown imposed in India since 22 March 2020, the migrant worker has become the focal point of public discourse. With public transports being cancelled and the inter-state borders sealed for public transportation, thousands of migrant workers -- particularly, from the national capital, New Delhi -- are literally walking hundreds of miles to travel to their homes. This article is a…
Cultural Matrix of the Online Hindutva Discourse in India
The promise of ‘Digital India’ has, on the one hand, supplied a new vocabulary of political participation, and, on the other hand, consolidated techniques of statist control. Taking off from here, this article examines the constituency of the Hindutva discourse online, and how the performativity of Hindutva reconfigures the digital public sphere. It seeks to understand: How do the ideologues of Hindutva territorialize certain online spaces? How d…
Post-memory and the third generation’s inheritance of the Indian partition (1947)
The experience of the Partition (1947)—the contexts of migration and the experience of refugeehood—in East-India is assumed to be different from that in the West. But, even after some 70 years after the Partition, there has been no substantial study on the difference in the ontology of refugeehood across the two sites. More to it, narratives from the North-east (Meghalaya, Assam, Tripura), which again differ significantly from their western India…
Pan-Hindutva and the Discursive Practices of Digital (Counter)Publics around #SupportCAA 1
In December 2019, the Indian parliament implemented the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that gives non-Muslim immigrants from the neighboring countries an easy access to Indian citizenship. Across India, the CAA has garnered support and provoked protests in equal measure. This paper examines how #SupportCAA constantly negotiates between two parallel objectives: first, to achieve a pan-national unification of non-Muslim “Indians” (practically, Hin…
Of the (im)mobility regime in India
In this paper, we examine how the Indian welfare-capitalist state, in responding to the pandemic in diverse ways, has appealed to the ‘guilt conscience’ and played on the vexed positionality of the mobile elite, who following the pandemic, have to give up their freedom of mobility. We argue that the very condition of political legibility of the mobile subject is predicated upon the ethico-moral ideal of the ‘good citizen’, who, in the statist ima…
Probing ‘instaworthiness’
This article examines ‘instaworthiness’ as a classificatory category in discourses of place-making. It engages in social-semiotic analyses of the selfies clicked at instaworthy cafes and pubs in Kolkata to highlight how the photographic performativity of selfie-taking reconfigures the notions of placemaking. It accounts for: how is an ‘instaworthy’ spot made and consumed? What ramifications does showcasing the self within these specific sites hav…
Why the digital classroom is a bad model for digital learning
The pandemic has compelled educational institutes across the world to hastily adopt, adapt and cope with digital learning by developing ‘digital classrooms’, virtual learning environments replete with sophisticated technological features. The eagerness of the intent to ramp up technological infrastructures, however, is not reflected in the rethinking or redesigning of pedagogies for digital learning. Technocratic ambitions often have very little,…
A Phenomenological Analysis of Tourist Identity
There is a dearth of narrative research related to "tourist identity" in leisure and tourism studies. In this review paper, we identify this research gap upon performing a systematic review of articles in leisure and tourism studies published on the SCOPUS database in the last four decades (1979-2021). We furnish three theses based on the prevalent research gap and offer three propositions that foreground the questions of identity. We argue that …
The constituency of Digital Humanities in India
Digital Humanities (DH), as an emergent field, is increasingly gaining traction within the Indian academe. It is credited with pumping fresh life into studying the Humanities at a time when the relevance of Humanities is being questioned. However, the role of the ‘digital’ in studying the Humanities – whether DH is an autonomous field, or merely a data-driven technique/application, or characterises new methodologies that equip us to probe into ne…
How can a small app piss off an entire country?”
In this paper, we employ “everyday techno-nationalism” as a critical lens to unpack the Indian government’s ban of TikTok in 2020. We focus on social media discussions of the ban on Quora and Reddit, and examine how TikTok is perceived as a “Chinese” platform as contrasted, but simultaneously integral, to a techno-nationalist imagination of “Indian-ness.” We put forward two arguments based on our findings. First, we suggest that TikTok’s “Chinese…
The episteme(s) around Roma historiography
Since the 18th century, scholars have been claiming that Romani people originated from India. Folkloristists, ethnographers, linguists and demographers alike have sought to identify, classify and characterize the ‘Roma traits’ and map them onto an imagined notion of Indian-hood. Meanwhile, India has reappropriated the originary claim and started to embrace the Roma community as one of their ‘own’. This paper focuses on the epistemic and political…
Sociology (29 works) · Political science (26 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (21 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Art (13 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · History (13 works) · Law (13 works)