OUR TEAM

Amrita DasGupta

Founder

Amrita DasGupta is completing her PhD on “Trafficking and Climate Exile in the Indian Ocean Delats” supported by the SOAS Research fellowship from the Centre of Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She has been a fully funded Visiting Student Research Collaborator at the prestigious Department of History, Princeton University

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and Visiting Researcher at the King’s India institute, King’s college London. After having successfully completed the prestigious Landhaus Felllowship at the Rachel Carson Centre, Ludwig Maxmillan Universitat, she is appointed as a Guest Teacher at the London School of economics and political Science, and a Guest Lecturer at the Rachel Carson Centre, Ludwig Maxmillan Universitat. She has previously worked with the 1947 Partition Archive (2016- 2018) and the Netaji Subhash Open University Partition Project (2017-2019).

Subhadip Mukherjee

Subhadip Mukherjee is a doctoral candidate in the School of Classics, English and History at the University of Kent, UK. His doctoral thesis focuses on the possibilities of resistance and subversion in contemporary refugee narratives emerging from spaces of encampment. His doctoral project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England (CHASE).

Arka Chakraborty

Arka Chakraborty is a final year PhD student and third-generation partition survivor, Arka is a music historian specialising in postcolonial Calcutta. Drawing from a vast array of official and personal archives, and field interviews, his multisensorial and multilingual doctoral project throws light into the musical interflows between the Anglophone and vernacular spaces that have inhabited the metropolis.

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For the same, Arka is looking into Calcuttan Anglophone band music networks, popular music in print, musical salaciousness, and the politics of Bengali translation within the pop-rock aesthetic. After two years of digging out Calcutta’s lost sonic architectures, he is now in the early stages of writing up. On the performative side, Arka is a singer-songwriter and a multi-instrumentalist. A television artiste, he specialises in Bangla adhunik, having trained under the tutelage of Pt. Jayanta Sarkar. Currently, he is developing his knowledge of Hindustani ragas from Budhaditya Bhattacharyya, a disciple of Pt. Ajoy Chakrabarty. Arka’s recent performances include prestigious venues like the Durham Oriental Museum (2022) and the Old Bailey in London (2023).

Debasmita Das

Debasmita Das is a postgraduate student at King’s College London and an intercollegiate at SOAS University, primarily interested in the performative disposition, aural habits, and censored voices of the gendered social space of the madhyabitya (middle-class) bhadramahila (the genteel woman) set in the backdrop of a colonised Bengali society.

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Delving into the autobiographic discourses of countless female artists and their brief encounters with emerging mass media, Debasmita is documenting the blurred lines between female performance and prostitution, alongside the transversion of the elite into a performer. Analysing the psychological impacts of suppression, hate speech and internalised self-censorship amidst sociopolitical warfare such as immigration and refugee; she is advocating the sonic presence of the Bengali woman. Debasmita is also currently giving music lessons supervised by Jonathan Pix at ‘The King’s-St George’s Widening Participation in Music Project’ developed by Senior Research Fellow Esther Cavett alongside KCL academics Katherine Schofield, Matthew Head and Flora Willson, in hopes of increasing music literacy. On a more performative side, she has primarily been a student of Hindustani ragas and performed all over India; with a keen interest in Western music, she has also been an active part of KCL Jazz Chorus & Orchestra.