'Burmese Women and Bengali Men's Dilemma: A Colonial Chapter of Love, Hate, and More'.

When the Bengali men emigrated to colonised Burma (1886-1948) as a part of a colonial policy, they encountered Burmese women, and faced an immediate challenge to accommodate them in the familiar  Bengali discourses of womanhood. The lecture would trace the passionate and baffling responses of the Bengali men to the  Burmese women on the backdrop of colonial realities. 

Parthasarathi Bhaumik is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. His recent publications are  Bengalis in Burma: A Colonial Encounter (Routledge,UK, 2021), Nilkar Thomas Macheller Dinlipi ('The Journal of Thomas Machell, an Indigo Planter', Signet, Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, 2023). He worked in the British Library, UK as a British Library-Chevening Fellow, and built a database on ‘Nationalism, Independence, and Partition in South Asia (1900–1950)'. He taught South Asian cultures and history in the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan for the last two years. He is presently working on to build a digital archive of the manuscripts of Jibanananda Das, a noted modern poet of Bengali literature. 

Exploring the Gutters: Illinois’ South Asian Comics Collection

The journey to build the South Asian comics collection at Illinois is as full of twists and turns as the graphic narratives that comprise it. In this talk, I will share the history and evolution of the collection situated within the context of comics production and circulation in South Asia. Then I will showcase samples from the collection to illustrate the behind-the-scenes labor required to process materials and make the collection accessible. 

Mara Thacker is the South Asian Studies & Global Popular Culture Librarian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As an Associate Professor, she has cultivated a research agenda on trends in area studies librarianship with a focus on distinctive collections, especially international comics, and public engagement. Mara’s work to build and market one of the largest collections of South Asian comics in a North American research library contributed to her receiving the Library Journal’s Movers & Shakers award in 2017. Mara is also one of the founders and editors-in-chief of the Journal of Library Outreach and Engagement. Mara is currently serving as President of the Comics Studies Society’s Research Librarian Cohort.

Writing like a Woman: Poetry, Domesticity and the Feminine Self

At a tea party in January 1930, the critic Pramatha Chaudhuri complained that Bengali women authors simply mimicked the style of male writers and lacked a genuinely feminine voice. He discussed the subject with the writer Radharani Devi who disputed his claim; but he remained skeptical. Unable to persuade him, Radharani decided to give Chaudhuri his ask--a feminine voice. Embarking upon a literary experiment, she adopted the nom de plume “Aparajita Devi” and started writing poetry in a markedly “feminine” style about women’s experience of everyday domestic life. Aparajita’s poems were wildly popular!

Examining a set of Aparajita Devi’s poems, my presentation addresses the idea of the authentically feminine: Is it the voice, the diction, or the content that makes Aparajita’s poems “womanly”? I examine how Radharani Devi had deliberated on Chaudhuri’s assertion about the absence of an “authentic” women’s voice in literature and had supplied it, bringing out through the poems the breadth and vitality of the prosaic, everyday womanhood of Bengal. Finally, I examine how Radharani Devi’s poetic ventriloquism had complicated the question of women’s writing by unveiling that the “authentically feminine” voice that the critics demanded was itself no more than a literary persona to be adopted or set aside. 

Debali Mookerjea–Leonard is the Roop Distinguished Professor of English at James Madison University. She is a gold medalist in comparative literature from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is the author of Literature, Gender, and the Trauma of Partition and the co-editor of In the Shadow of Partition. Her research has been published in Feminist Review, Social Text, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and elsewhere. She also translates Bengali poetry and fiction. Her work has been supported by the American Association of University Women, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Approaching India's Architecture in the Urban Century

In this paper, I provide an overview of my ongoing dissertation research that explores the systemic shifts in institutionalized architectural productions vis-à-vis the evolving figure of the architect in urban India since the 1991 economic reforms. Drawing from a range of critical scholarship on capitalism, technology, and postcolonialism, I examine how the rise of neoliberalism, informatization, and political Hindutva alters the systems governing architectural productions, changing the spatial environments of India’s cities. Departing from the more conventional approaches of architectural history, I treat architecture as a planetary process of spatial production distributed over expanded networks of national, supranational, and global political economies and shed light on how the government-realtor-architect nexus is operationalized to advance ideological projects.

Soumya Dasgupta is a Ph.D. Candidate in Architecture. He has a Master's in Urban Design from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, Kolkata, India. His scholarly interests include neoliberal developmentalism, digital technocracy, Global South, and South Asia. His Ph.D. dissertation broadly explores the contested systems of architectural production in the context of urban India in the 21st century. He has presented his research at academic conferences, including the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), and International Association for the Study of Traditional Environment (IASTE), as well as Ph.D. conferences at Georgia Tech, AA London, and UCLA. Soumya was a Humanities Research Institute Graduate Fellow for 2023-24 and a former recipient of the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship. He loves teaching and has worked as a Teaching Assistant for graduate-level history, theory, and design studio courses in Architecture. He has also served as an external reviewer in various design studios in India, South Africa, and the USA.