Name: Ratul Biswas
Email: ratulbiswasju@gmail.com
Name of the supervisor: Dr. Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay
Research Focus: My project claims to highlight how bhadralok cultural Marxism in West Bengal acted as a reflexive agent in one of the most casteist societies in India. In order to understand this phenomenon, it reflects upon the historical route through which this cultural Marxism came into existence and focuses on the first three decades of the post-colonial era as they constituted the formative phase of the former. This is also a phase when the novel experience of popular sovereignty made possible a metamorphosis of the meaning of the ‘political’. It is only by the ’80s of the last century that a new articulation of ‘political’ became hegemonic at the national level. This new ‘political’, however, took different forms in different regional contexts. In its upper India variants, ‘identity’ (caste/communal) overtook class considerations; whereas, in West Bengal, the opposite became the norm. However, in the formative years, both ‘identity’ and ‘class’ engaged with each other in a dialectical interplay to shape the emergent ‘political’. This project traces the ways in which this dialectic, in the process of producing a normative ‘political’ for the posterity to follow, also reconstructed the ‘selfhood’ in castes of West Bengal.
Education: M.Phil (History), Jadavpur University (2022), M.A. (History), Jadavpur University, Kolkata (2017)
Fellowship/Scholarship: Institute Fellow, IISER Mohali
Achievements: Qualified UGC NET for Assistant Professor in History