Aparajita Basu
Assistant Professor
PhD (University Of California, Berkeley)
+91.79.61911514
Research Interests: Modern South & Southeast Asia, Pan-Asianism, Cultural Internationalism, Global History, Women's History
Aparajita Basu is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Languages division of the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University. Her research is broadly focused on the intellectual and cultural history of the subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, she is interested in the internationalist and transnational dimensions of anticolonial political ideologies that emerged in this period, such as Pan-Asianism and diasporic nationalisms.
She completed her PhD at U.C. Berkeley, where her dissertation examined the contributions of Indian women’s rights reformers to discourses of Asian civilisational unity prevalent in the early twentieth century in India, often characterised contemporarily as ‘Asianism’. She studied the ways in which a discursive engagement with an essentialised ‘East’ in Anglophone print media contributed to the creation of a uniquely inter-Asian ‘frame of reference’ for women’s issues in India, inviting comparison between the status of women’s rights in India and other Asian nations. Basu also has an MPhil in Social Anthropological Analysis from the University of Cambridge and an undergraduate degree in English Literature and Language from the University of Oxford.
Forthcoming