Bodhisattva Kar

Fellow in History

PhD. (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)

Research Interests:   

Spatial history; histories of development and disciplines; nineteenth and early twentieth-century history of South and South East Asia (particularly the Indian north-east); production of the primitive; nationalism and joint-stock companies.

Courses Taught:
 

Interrogating Political Economy: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Cultures of Postcoloniality

Research Methods in Social Sciences (Option II)

SELECTED LIST OF PUBLICATIONS:

BOOKS/MONOGRAPHS:

• What Is In a Name: Politics of Spatial Imagination in Colonial Assam (Guwahati: Centre for Northeast India, South and Southeast Asia Studies, Omeo Kumar Das Institute for Social Change and Development, 2004)

• Productivities of Imprecision: Some Thoughts on the Histories of the Social, Kuruvilla Zachariah Memorial Lecture 2008 (Calcutta: Department of History, Presidency College, forthcoming)

Articles in Edited Volumes:

• “Can the Postcolonial Begin?: Deprovincializing Assam”, in Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Modernity in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

• “Incredible Stories in the time of Credible Histories: Colonial Assam and Translations of Vernacular Geographies”, in Partha Chatterjee and Raziuddin Aquil (eds.), History in the Vernacular (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008)

• “When Was the Postcolonial: A History of Policing Impossible Lines”, in Sanjib Baruah (ed.) Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008)

• “The Assam fever: Identities of a Disease and Diseases of an Identity”, in Debraj Bhattacharya (ed.), Of Matters Modern The Experience of Modernity in Colonial and Post-colonial South Asia (Calcutta: Seagull, 2008)

• “Energizing Tea, Enervating Opium: Culture of Commodities in Colonial Assam”, in Manas ray (ed.), Space, Sexuality and Postcolonial Cultures. Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, ENRECA papers series, 2002.

Journal Articles:

•  “‘Tongue Has No Bone: Fixing the Assamese Language, c. 1800 – c. 1930”, Studies in History (forthcoming)

• “The Tragedy of Suryya Bhuyan”, Biblio, 13: 5-6 (May-June 2008)

• “The Assam Fever”, Wellcome History, No. 23, June 2003

• “Imagining Post-Indian Histories”, Seminar, No. 524, April 2003

 WORKING PAPERS AND OTHER ARTICLES:

• "The Science of the Deep: Geological Imagination and British Assam"