Rosinka Chaudhuri (D.Phil. Oxon) is Professor of Cultural Studies and also current Director at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). She is a member of St Hugh's College, Oxford, and has held visiting positions at University College London, King's College London, Delhi University, Cambridge University and Columbia University. [1]
She is married to Amit Chaudhuri, who is a renowned Indian novelist, poet, essayist, and musician; they have one daughter, Aruna, a singer-songwriter based in London.
Rosinka is the daughter of Sri Ranjan Khastgir, one of the earliest graduates of IIT Kharagpur who retired as the Executive Director of Hindustan Copper Ltd. They belong to a very famous family which originates in Chittagong.
Her books include Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (Seagull: 2002), Freedom and Beef-Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture (Orient Blackswan: 2012), and The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Cultural Sphere (Oxford University Press: 2013, Peter Lang: 2014). She has also edited and introduced Derozio, Poet of India: A Definitive Edition (Oxford University Press, 2008), The Indian Postcolonial (with Elleke Boehmer, Routledge, 2010), A History of Indian Poetry in English (Cambridge University Press: New York, 2016), An Acre of Green Grass and Other English Writings of Buddhadeva Bose (OUP, 2018) and George Orwell's Burmese Days (Oxford World Classics, 2021).
In addition she has translated and introduced the complete text of the letters Rabindranath Tagore wrote his niece Indira Debi as a young man, calling it Letters from a Young Poet (1887-94) (Penguin Modern Classics, 2014). Her present research is tentatively titled India's First Radicals: Young Bengal under the British Empire.
Her work lies at the intersection of literature and history, in the area broadly known as Cultural Studies. She has worked on the nineteenth-century literary sphere in Bengal, looking at the formation of a modern cultural sphere in the context of episodes surrounding the writing of poetry; on Tagore, on his translations in Gitanjali from the Bengali as well as the incantatory musicality of his Bengali poetry; on Indian poetry in English, introducing the tradition and its development; and on Postcolonial Studies, on which she has a revisionist take. Currently she is thinking about the category into which the polemic of Postcolonial Studies seems to have retreated: World Literature, and wondering where the 'world' in World Literature is. [2]
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay was an Indian Bengali novelist, poet, essayist and journalist. He was the author of the 1882 Bengali language novel Anandamath, which is one of the landmarks of modern Bengali and Indian literature. He was the composer of Vande Mataram, written in highly Sanskritised Bengali, personifying India as a mother goddess and inspiring activists during the Indian Independence Movement. Chattopadhayay wrote fourteen novels and many serious, serio-comic, satirical, scientific and critical treatises in Bengali. He is known as Sahitya Samrat in Bengali.
The Bengal Renaissance, also known as the Bengali Renaissance, was a cultural, social, intellectual, and artistic movement that took place in the Bengal region of the British Raj, from the late 18th century to the early 20th century. Historians have traced the beginnings of the movement to the victory of the British East India Company at the 1757 Battle of Plassey, as well as the works of reformer Raja Rammohan Roy, considered the "Father of the Indian Renaissance," born in 1772. Nitish Sengupta stated that the movement "can be said to have … ended with Rabindranath Tagore," Asia's first Nobel laureate.
Indian English literature (IEL), also referred to as Indian Writing in English (IWE), is the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language but whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. Its early history began with the works of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt followed by Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao contributed to the growth and popularity of Indian English fiction in the 1930s. It is also associated, in some cases, with the works of members of the Indian diaspora who subsequently compose works in English.
Kallol refers to one of the most influential literary movements in Bengali literature, which can be placed approximately between 1923 and 1935. The name Kallol of the Kallol group derives from a magazine of the same name. Kallol was the main mouthpiece for a group of young writers starting their careers around that time including Premendra Mitra, Kazi Nazrul Islam, and Buddhadeb Basu. A number of other magazines that followed Kallol can also be placed as part of the general movement. These include Uttara (1925), Pragati (1926), Kalikolom (1926), and Purbasha (1932).
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer, and music composer from India.
Kamini Roy was a Bengali poet, social worker and feminist in British India. She was the first woman honours graduate in British India.
Nabaneeta Dev Sen was an Indian writer and academic. After studying arts and comparative literature, she moved to the United States where she studied further. She returned to India and taught at several universities and institutes as well as serving in various positions in literary institutes. She published more than 80 books in Bengali: poetry, novels, short stories, plays, literary criticism, personal essays, travelogues, humour writing, translations and children's literature. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2000 and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1999.
The Tagore family has been one of the leading families of Kolkata, India, and is regarded as one of the key influencers during the Bengali Renaissance. The family has produced several people who have contributed substantially in the fields of business, social and religious reformation, literature, art, politics and music. The most prominent figures of this family include Dwarkanath Tagore, a pioneering industrialist; Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel laureate in literature; Abanindranath Tagore, a distinguished artist and more.
Sukanta Chaudhuri is an Indian literary scholar, now Professor Emeritus at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata and the University of Oxford. He taught at Presidency College from January 1973 to December 1991 and at Jadavpur University thereafter till his retirement in June 2010. At Jadavpur, he was founding Director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records, a pioneering centre of digital humanities in India. His chief fields of study are the English and European Renaissance, translation, textual studies and digital humanities. He has held visiting appointments at many places including All Souls College, Oxford; St John's College, Cambridge; the School of Advanced Study, London; University of Alberta, University of Virginia; and Loyola University, Chicago. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Asiatic Society, Kolkata and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Shakespeare Association. In July 2021, he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Supriya Chaudhuri is an Indian scholar of English literature. She is Professor Emerita at Kolkata's Jadavpur University.
Indian English poetry is the oldest form of Indian English literature. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio is considered the first poet in the lineage of Indian English poetry followed by Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and Toru Dutt, among others.
Romesh Chunder Dutt was an Indian civil servant, economic historian, translator of Ramayana and Mahabharata. He was one of the prominent proponents of Indian economic nationalism.
Bishnu Dey was a leading Bengali poet, writer, essayist, academician, art appreciator, and connoisseur in the era of modernism and post-modernism.
Rabindra Kumar Das Gupta was an Indian scholar of Bengali and English literature and a social and cultural commentator. He was considered by his peers as one of the last scholars with equal command of English and Bengali languages.
Bangladeshi English literature (BEL) refers to the body of literary work written in the English language in Bangladesh and the Bangladeshi diaspora. In academia, it is also now referred to as Bangladeshi Writing in English (BWE). Early prominent Bengali writers in English include Ram Mohan Roy, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Begum Rokeya, and Rabindranath Tagore. In 1905, Begum Rokeya (1880–1932) wrote Sultana's Dream, one of the earliest examples of feminist science fiction. Modern writers of the Bangladeshi diaspora include Tahmima Anam, Neamat Imam, Monica Ali, and Zia Haider Rahman.
Gora is a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, set in Calcutta, in the 1880s during the British Raj. It is the fifth in order of writing and the longest of Tagore's twelve novels. It is rich in philosophical debate on politics and religion. Other themes include liberation, universalism, brotherhood, gender, feminism, caste, class, tradition versus modernity, urban elite versus rural peasants, colonial rule, nationalism and the Brahmo Samaj.
Ketaki Kushari Dyson is a Bengali-born poet, novelist, playwright, translator and critic, diaspora writer and scholar. Born and educated in Calcutta (Kolkata), India, she has lived most of her adult life near Oxford. She writes in Bengali and English, on topics as wide-ranging as Bengal, England, the various diaspora, feminism and women's issues, cultural assimilation, multiculturalism, gastronomy, social and political topics.
Dwijendranath Tagore was an Indian poet, song composer, philosopher, mathematician and painter. He was one of the pioneers of shorthand and notation in Bengali script. He was the eldest son of Debendranath Tagore and the eldest brother of Rabindranath Tagore.
Swarnakumari Devi, also known as Swarnakumari Tagore, Swarnakumari Ghosal, Svarṇakumārī Debī and Srimati Svarna Kumari Devi, was an Indian Bengali writer, editor, essayist, poet, novelist, playwright, composer, and social worker.
Bashabi Fraser is an Indian-born Scottish academic, editor, translator, and writer. She is a Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University and an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and an Honorary Fellow of the Association of Literary Studies (ALS), Scotland, and a former Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She has authored and edited 23 books, published several articles and chapters, both academic and creative and as a poet.