Doctor Sanghamitra Misra
Nationality: India
Year: 2003
Subject Area: Social Sciences
After receiving my Ph.D. degree in September 2004, I returned to India to join as an Associate Fellow at a research institute in Bangalore (The Centre for the Study of Culture and Society) where in between institutional duties, I was able to rework parts of my dissertation into essays that were published in two refereed journals(1). In June 2005, I organized a national workshop, ‘Thinking Through ‘Region’’, a conceptual preoccupation of my research on identity construction in northeastern India(2). Another significant concern of the Ph.D. had been about understanding problems with the writing of history and the problems of the master narrative--- who produces history, who deconstructs it, the challenges to the master narrative and the implications of all of this for the imagining of cultural identity in frontier regions. Through much of 2005-2006, I have been able extend my initial research in this area, primarily through some new archival and field work, but also through some lectures and papers that I gave in Universities and research institutions in Assam (3). More recently, I had a chance to critically rethink my work in an international workshop where I presented a paper on emerging narratives(4). As a university lecturer in New Delhi now, I continue to work on projects which look at orality and non-historical ways of constructing the past, and on borderland histories, in between my teaching duties.
1.. ‘Changing Frontiers and Spaces: The Colonial State in Nineteenth Century Goalpara’, Studies in History, Vol. 22 July—December, 2005; 'Redrawing frontiers: language, resistance and the imagining of a Goalparia people', Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 43:2, 2006.
2. I co-authored a report for the workshop with Tejaswini Niranjana, ‘Thinking Through ‘Region’’, Economic and Political Weekly, October 29, 2005, Vol. 44 & 45.
3.One of my lectures has been published as Erased histories, Forced Boundaries: A Story from Colonial Goalpara, Indian Council of Historical Research, North East Regional Centre, Guwahati, 2007.
4. ‘Telling a Different Story: Reclaiming Histories and New Subjectivities from Colonial Northeast India’---paper presented at the International Workshop on ‘The Master Narrative Challenged: Dominant Histories and Emerging Narratives’, SEPHIS programme (The Netherlands) and SEASREP Foundation (The Philippines), University of San Carlos, Cebu City, Philippines, 31 January---- 2 February