Sucharita Sen

Sucharita is exploring the non-official interpersonal relationships between the expatriate Britons and their Indian employees in Britain's Indian Empire.

Qualifications

PhD in History, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2022

M.A. [Gold Medallist] in Political Science, Presidency University, Kolkata, 2017

B.A [Honours with Rank] in Political Science, University of Calcutta, 2015

Profile

Sucharita is a doctoral graduate working on the politics of everyday lives in nineteenth and twentieth century colonial India. She completed her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Kolkata, India. Drawing upon Foucauldian bio-politics and the theoretical intervention of social structuration, Sucharita’s M.A. thesis explored the patterns of matrimonial advertisements, stereotypical gendered roles, rituals and negotiations in arranged and love-marriages. All the defining moments of marriage, the study argued, smacked of the patriarchal biases which remain anchored in middle-class, upper-caste Hindu Bengali society of urban Kolkata.

Sucharita nurtures a long-standing fascination for the various theoretical debates and research methods in the humanities and social sciences, social anthropology, histories and politics beyond their conventional epicentres, and gender studies. She moved to Wellington in 2018 to pursue her PhD. Her current thesis explores the non-official interpersonal relationships between the expatriate Britons and their Indian employees in Britain’s Indian Empire. Based on postcolonial critiques of Orientalism and the theoretical underpinnings of affect, the thesis reverses the concept of racial and gendered subalternity, reconfigures social relations of labour, and complicates existing understanding of race-relations. This study is one of the first attempts to foreground a parallel discourse of social exchange where hierarchies and intimacies co-existed in a paradoxical companionship. This new framework, she hopes, will be extended to other parts of the Empire to unravel the myriad faces of colonialism.

Her select awards include the Walter Arnstein Prize for the Best Graduate Paper at the Annual Midwest Conference on British Studies (2021), the Prize for the Best Postgraduate Paper at the Biennial Conference of the New Zealand Historical Association (2021), and a Certificate of Excellence from Oxford University Press (2022).

Supervisors

Publications

Journal Articles

'The Anglo-Indian Household: Paradoxes of Hierarchy and Intimacy in Imperial Domestic Space’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 5 (October 2022) [forthcoming].

‘The Melody of Universalism: Political Thought in Rabindra Sangeet’, Society and Culture in South Asia, Online First, 13 May 2022, pp. 1-24.

‘The Uneasy Gaze: Appearing for Interviews to get Married – An Empirical Investigation into the Pre-marital Arranged Marriage Negotiations in Urban Kolkata’, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Vol. 13, No. 2 (April-June 2021), pp. 1-11.

‘Memsahibs and Ayahs during the Indian Mutiny: In English Memoirs and Fiction’, Studies in People’s History, Volume 7, Issue 2 (December 2020), pp. 159-170. (Special Issue: Reconstructing Women’s History).

Book Chapters

‘From the Inability to “Find” a Spouse to the Inability to “Adjust” with the Spouse: The Plight of Spinsters and Divorcees in Urban Kolkata’ in Subhadeep Paul and Goutam Majhi (Eds.) Beyond the Heteronorm: Interrogating Critical Alterities (Maryland: Lexington Books, under contract).

‘Disguised Dowry and the Ritualization of Patriarchy: An Empirical Exploration of the Institution of Marriage in Urban Kolkata’ in Anuradha Tiwari and Tarakeshwar Gupta (Eds.). Gender, Equality and Development: A Perspective from Academia (Delaware: Vernon Press, under contract).

Book Review

Rita Banerjee, India in Early Modern English Travel Writings: Protestantism, Enlightenment, and Toleration (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021), New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, Vol, 24, No. 1 (June 2022).