Joya Chatterji

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Joya Chatterji FBA is Professor of South Asian History and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.[1][2] She specialises in modern South Asian history and was the editor of the journal Modern Asian Studies for fifteen years.[3]

Education[]

Chatterji has First Class Honours Degrees in History from Lady Sri Ram College of the University of Delhi, and Trinity College, Cambridge where she graduated at the top of the History list and won the Earl of Derby Prize for the most distinguished performance in the Historical Tripos. She took a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.[1] Her doctoral thesis was on "Communal politics and the partition of Bengal, 1932-1947".[4]

Career[]

Chatterji was Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge 1989-1994. From 1997 to 2002 she was Senior Research Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge and Lecturer in History, Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1999 she won a John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation award to support her early work on refugees. She taught at the London School of Economics from 2000 until taking up her post at the Faculty of History in Cambridge in 2007.[2] While at the LSE she worked with Drs Claire Alexander and Annu Jalais on researching the experience of Bengali Muslim migrants, leading to their book The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration and the Bangla Stories project.[5]

Since 2014 she has been Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge, and was also, for some time, Director of the University's Centre of South Asian Studies.[1][6] Her research interests are listed as "Modern South Asian history; imperial and world history; partitions and borders; refugees, migration and diaspora; mobility and immobility; citizenship and minority formation in the late 20th century", and she has supervised some 30 doctoral theses in these and cognate areas. She taught courses on South Asian and world history at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, her courses including "The History of the Indian subcontinent from the late eighteenth century to the present day" and "World History since 1914".[1]

Since 2009 she has been the editor of Modern Asian Studies. She has served on the editorial boards of The Historical Journal, Journal of Contemporary History and Economic and Political Weekly.[2]

About her work Chatterji has said:[7]

I have been drawn to certain themes for much of my academic life. Yes, there is an ongoing critique in my work of the modern nation state and its relationship to equality and dignity. I am no fan of 'national sovereignty' which expresses itself by putting people in cages at borders, ghettoising religious (or other) minorities and pitting them against (constantly constructed) majorities. I was disillusioned by nationalism long before most of my contemporaries. Moving from India to Britain to live with a 'brown' son, I experienced, in my gut, what it meant to be seen as 'lesser' every day, having to talk to my son gently about how to negotiate this landscape, and to live in a society that condoned this. So my intellectual preoccupations were further energised by personal experience. It has driven not only my academic work, to date, but also my public engagement activities (e.g. the 'Bangla Stories' and 'Our Migration Stories' work on curriculum development). I felt it was vital for British children of all stripes to learn 'why people are where they are' from a very young age, before they learnt the harsh stereotypes about migrants and are immersed in the discourses about migration that waft around them. If I have achieved anything tangible in my life, it is this work, I believe, that will count.

I should admit that in my process of listening to the sounds of the past, I have a politics. I am attentive, and I hope sensitive, to the weak, the marginalised, those whose sounds are barely discernible. This is perhaps most clearly expressed in my work in The Bengal Diaspora and the recent articles on immobility, but it has been there from the start. You will find that every historian has a politics, however quiet or understated. Even those whose only claim is to be 'impartial' are locating themselves, willy nilly, within the politics of knowledge.

Accolades[]

Chatterji was awarded major research fellowships from the AHRC (2006) and the Leverhulme Trust (2013). She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2018, and is also a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (2013) and of the Royal Historical Society (2017).[8][2]

She is a joint awardee of the Royal Historical Society's Award for Public History (2018) and The Guardian University Award for Research Impact (2019) for Our Migration Story. She has twice received public recognition as a 'Woman of Achievement' from the University of Cambridge.

In his Introduction to Partition's Legacies, David Washbrook wrote that Chatterji's work has

changed the way that we think about Indian (and, more broadly, South Asian) history over the last century. Her first book, Bengal Divided (1994), shifted focus away from Islam and Muslim "fanaticism" in providing the driving force behind the Partition of India and on to supposedly "secular" Indian nationalism, middle-class aspiration, and the shadow of Hindu nationalism. Her second book, The Spoils of Partition (2007), rejected the idea of Partition as a breaking apart and took it more as a process of remaking – of both the social structure of eastern India and the nature of the post-colonial state. Her third (jointly written) The Bengal Diaspora (2016) challenged the idea of migration and (re-)settlement as exceptional conditions and viewed them in multiple dimensions as responding to precise and complex motivations. Her latest project on "citizenship", whose beginnings are reflected in essays included below, contrasts the rigidities of formal and legal "national" citizenship with the serendipitous and opportunistic political circumstances often lying behind its definition. What is striking about this oeuvre, first and foremost, is its courage and originality. In all cases, it confronts received wisdoms which are often deeply held and capable of mobilising soldieries in their defence.

Public impact[]

The connections between the partition of India and migration to Britain have been poorly understood in the public domain. This is also true of migration from ancient to contemporary times. Chatterji has helped develop two projects questioning the narrative of 'our island story' through a focus on human migration: 1) Our Migration Story (OMS), a website that seeks to embed the goal of decolonising the curriculum in schools by making the world's interconnectedness, and its links to Britain, more visible and intelligible to young people. 2) The Freedom and Fragmentation Exhibition displayed rare photographs and provided an intimate view of India's partition uprooted in the largest mass migration in human history. These projects have had an impact upon school pupils, teachers, curators, archivists, photographers, and the public in the UK and India, encouraging them to reflect upon the history of migration and how it has shaped society today.

These projects have had an impact upon school pupils, teachers, curators, archivists, photographers, and the public in the UK and India, encouraging them to reflect upon the history of migration and how it has shaped society today.

OMS draws upon Chatterji's conceptual innovations in the understanding of migration, which in turn draw on her empirical research on the long-term consequences of the partition of India. Her research has also helped to explain a major conundrum: why South Asia produced so many migrants – far more than other regions partitioned or affected by violence and nation formation – and why so many of these migrants came to Britain. She concludes that the distinction between 'forced' and 'economic migration' was largely spurious; that so many Indians moved as refugees after 1947 because they were already bound up in networks of mobility (largely for work) long before then. They moved in both instances, along the same 'grooves'. She also points to both the dynamism and fragility of migrant networks. Together with Claire Alexander (Manchester), she underlines the extent to which migrants experience and perform their identity differently in different settings, revealing the local and affective dimensions of place in community formation.

The AHRC supported the Bengal Diaspora project (2006-10), the first stage of this research. Chatterji worked in collaboration with a leading sociologist at the LSE, and later at Manchester, Claire Alexander.

Alexander and Chatterji worked closely with the Swadhinata Trust, a community group in London, activists and NGOs in Bangladesh and across Britain. The Runnymede Trust, with which Alexander was linked, helped develop the successful Bangla Stories website. OMS, also funded by the AHRC, 'scaled up' the impact of the Bangla Stories project to a whole new level, by drawing on the research expertise of many more historians of migration across the UK.

To better understand the very different challenges of migrations across time, Chatterji and Alexander put together a new team of research assistants: Sundeep Lidher, a Cambridge PhD student of post-war migration to Britain, and Malachi McIntosh and Debbie Weekes- Bernard of the Runnymede Trust. This core team gathered a group of over 90 people: academic and community historians, museum curators, archivists, web-designers, filmmakers, teachers, examination boards, teacher-trainers and textbook writers. The 'Contributors' included a large group of scholars, all leaders in their fields, whose expertise spanned AD 43 to the present day. Where their language was too complex for Key Stage 3 or GCSE audiences, OMS built a structure of simple ideas that 'undergirded' these case-studies. A handful of scholars were also invited to give mini-lectures on their specialisms, which were filmed for the website. Both the Freedom and Fragmentation exhibition and OMS drew on thirty years of Chatterji's research on India's partition and migration within and from the subcontinent.

The Freedom and Fragmentation Exhibition had impact of a different, and much more intimate, kind. Targeted at the adult public in Cambridge, Leeds, and Sheffield, its goal was a) to display vivid images of the connections between India, Pakistan and Britain and b) to explain why and when people - Indian, Pakistani and British – moved as they did. The exhibition's mission was to challenge long-standing nationalist, patriotic and communal rhetoric to display – with sensitivity – how different people were caught up in these events, how differently they viewed them, and how they tried actively to survive in new settings. It made an immediate, often profound, impact upon people who saw close-up images of scared and despairing people for whom 'home', very suddenly, became a concept, rather than a place. The exhibition gave the largest migration in human history a granular, human face. Because it captured both brown and white persons uprooted at the same moment, it challenged British viewers to think in fresh ways about race and nation, home and abroad.

This theme emerged out of discussions over years with Canon Michael Roden of the Church of England who had expressed to Chatterji his concern about the continuing impact of racial and religious tensions in Britain as a legacy of partition. Chatterji was then Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, an interdisciplinary centre. Most of the images exhibited were from the Centre of South Asian Studies' archive, and had never been displayed before, while a handful were borrowed from private collections. The exhibition was designed to both inform visitors of the lived historical reality of partition and to invoke memory and emotional responses to those events.

Personal life[]

Chatterji was born and brought up in Delhi, India.[9] She has a son born in 1991. She brought him up as a single parent from 1997. For medical reasons she retired from the Faculty of History in 2019, but remains a fellow of Trinity College. [2]

Books[]

Bengal divided. Hindu communalism and partition, 1932-1947, (1995, Cambridge UP: ISBN 9780521411288)

Published in Bengali as Bangla bhag holo (2004, Dhaka UP: ISBN 9789840502660)

The Spoils of Partition. Bengal and India 1947-1967 (2007, Cambridge UP: ISBN 9780521875363)

Published in Bengali as Deshbhager Arjon, Bangla o Bharat (2016, Dhaka: Moula Brothers)

Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora (edited by Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook: 2013, Taylor and Francis: ISBN 9780415480109)

The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration (by Claire Alexander, Joya Chatterji and Annu Jalais: 2016, Routledge: ISBN 9780415530736)

Partition's Legacies (with an Introduction by David Washbrook: 2019, Permanent Black: ISBN 9788178245393)

Articles[]

  • 'Secularization and "Constitutive Moments": insights from Partition Diplomacy in South Asia', in Humeira Iqtidar and Tanika Sarkar (eds.), Secularization and Tolerance in South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
  • 'Decolonisation in South Asia: the long view', in Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson (eds), Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, (Oxford University Press, 2018.)
  • 'Gandhi, Princes and Subjects. Alternatives to Citizenship at the End of Empire', in Naren Nanda (ed.), Gandhi's Moral Politics, (2017.)
  • 'Rejoinder': Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies symposium on the on The Bengal Diaspora; Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, Volume 40, 2017.
  • 'Introduction' (with Prasannan Parthasarathi), Modern Asian Studies (Special Issue: 'New Directions in Social and Economic History') 51.2, 2017.
  • 'On being Stuck in the Bengal Delta: Immobility on the "Age of Migration"', Modern Asian Studies (Special Issue: 'New Directions in Social and Economic History') Vol. 51.2, March 2017.
  • 'Partition Studies: Potential and Pitfalls', The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 73, No. 2 (May) 2014.
  • 'Secularisation and Partition Emergencies', Economic and Political Weekly, December 2013.
  • 'Dispositions and Destinations. "Mobility Capital" and Migration in the Bengal delta', Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 55 Issue 02, 2013.
  • 'Introduction' in J. Chatterji and D. Washbrook (eds) The Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora, (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 1-9.
  • 'From subject to citizen: Rethinking the "post-colonial" immigration order', in J. Chatterji and D. Washbrook (eds) The Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora, (London: Routledge, 2013), pp.189-196.
  • 'Nationalisms in India, 1857-1947', in John Breuilly (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Nationalisms, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, pp.242-262.
  • 'South Asian Histories of Citizenship', Historical Journal, December 2012, Vol. 55.
  • 'From subjecthood to citizenship. Migration, nationality and the post-imperial global order,' in Alfred McCoy and Stephen Jacobson (ed.), Endless Empires (Madison: Wisconsin University Press), 2012, pp.306-317.
  • 'Migration myths and the mechanics of assimilation. Two community histories from Bengal', Studies in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, XVII, Numbers 1 and 2, 2010.
  • 'New directions in partition studies', History Workshop Journal, March 2009.
  • '"Dispersal" and the failure of rehabilitation. Refugee camp-dwellers and squatters in West Bengal', Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 41, Issue 5, 2007.
  • 'The history of a frontier', Sephis, (web magazine) 3, 3, 2007.
  • 'Of graveyards and ghettos. Muslims in West Bengal, 1947-67', in Mushirul Hasan and Asim Roy (eds.), Living together separately. Cultural India in history and politics, (Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2005, pp. 222-250, 29 pp.
  • 'Nehru's legacy', Reviews in History, (web magazine) December 2004.
  • 'Writing about partition', Studies in History, 18, 1, 2002, 12 pp.
  • 'Rights or charity? Government and refugees: the debate over relief and rehabilitation in West Bengal, 1947-1950';, in Suvir Kaul (ed.), Partitions of memory, (Delhi: Permanent Black Press, 2001), pp. 74-110, 37 pp.
  • 'The decline, revival and fall of bhadralok influence in the nineteen-forties', in Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (ed.), Bengal: rethinking history. Essays on historiography, (Delhi: Manohar Publishers), 2001, pp. 297-315, 19 pp.
  • 'The Bengali Muslim; a contradiction in terms?'; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. XVI, 2, 1999.
  • 'The fashioning of a frontier: the Radcliffe line and Bengal's border landscape, 1947-1952', Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 33, Issue I, 1999.
  • 'The making of a borderline', in Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh (eds.), Region and partition, (Delhi: Oxford University Press), 1999, 168-202, 31 pp.
  • 'The Bengali Muslim', in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Islams, communities and the nation, (Delhi: Manohar Publishers), 205-219, 20 pp, 1998.

References[]

  1. ^ a b c d "Professor Joya Chatterji FBA". Faculty of History. University of Cambridge. Retrieved 10 September 2018.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Professor Joya Chatterji". Equality and Diversity. University of Cambridge: Faculty of History. Retrieved 10 September 2018.
  3. ^ "Modern Asian Studies". Cambridge UP. Retrieved 10 September 2018.
  4. ^ "Catalogue record for thesis". Copac. Retrieved 10 September 2018.
  5. ^ "Bangla Stories". LSE / Runnymede Trust. Retrieved 10 September 2018.
  6. ^ "Annual Report, 2014-2015" (PDF). Centre for South Asian Studies. Retrieved 10 September 2018. ... my first year as Director of the Centre...
  7. ^ "The Unfamiliarity of the Past". permanent-black.blogspot.com. Permanent Black. 11 November 2020. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
  8. ^ "Professor Joya Chatterji". British Academy. Retrieved 10 September 2018.
  9. ^ "Who we are: Dr Joya Chatterji". Bangla Stories. LSE / Runnymede Trust. Retrieved 10 September 2018.

External links[]

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