Humanities and Languages
Performing and Visual Arts
Research Interests: Modern South & Southeast Asia, Pan-Asianism, Cultural Internationalism, Global History, Women's History
Profile
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.
Teaching
- HST 202 South Asians in the World [A History of Global Travel and Migration]
- HST 280 Power in Movement: The History of Social Movements in India [Taught in ENABLE mode via modalities of theatre and visual art]
- HST 110 Dancing Power and Pain: Using Bharata Natyam to Understand Women's History in India
- FDP101 Democracy and Justice
Research
Forthcoming
Profile
Aparajita Basu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University, and the current Programme Chair of the Performing and Visual Arts division. She collaborates with artists and scholar-practitioners to design the Major in Integrated Arts. A global historian (PhD, U.C. Berkeley) whose research is broadly focused on cultural expressions of nationalism in the modern era, her work focuses on anticolonial political ideologies that proliferated in and out of South Asia in the early twentieth century, with specific attention to their intersection with internationalist movements such as Pan-Asianism and international feminism. Aparajita 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.
She aims to bring history to life in class by engaging with the arts, drawing on diverse creative sources such as literature, music, film, visual art and theatre. Trained in Bharat Natyam, she also enjoys introducing students to women’s history through dance/movement choreography and the history of social movements in India via modalities of performance.