This fall, the Mittal Institute welcomed a new Bajaj Visiting Fellow, Prof. Nilanjana Mukherjee, who is an English Literature professor from the University of Delhi, India. Nilanjana’s scholarship involves questions of space, place, landscape, and cartography in literary narratives and visual cultures. She shared more about her fellowship research plans and why she chose to come to Harvard.
Mittal Institute: Welcome, Nilanjana! What have your first impressions of Harvard been – how has the settling-in process been?
Nilanjana Mukherjee: This is my first visit to the U.S., and to be honest, I had expected a huge readjustment on my part to feel accommodated, but it has not been so at all. My first impression of being at Harvard University was that I felt included and welcomed by kind, understanding, and large-hearted people ranging from office and administrative staff to internationally reputed professors. The long months of foreboding dissipated into an eagerness to plunge headlong and connect as soon as I landed in Cambridge. The warm onboarding orientation on the first day, the grand architecture, my lovely office space and balmy weather were enough to set any apprehensions to rest.
Nilanjana Mukherjee.
Academically, it is heartening to see my area of work and research garnering the right amount of interest and curiosity from scholars and researchers with whom I have been able to engage. Professionally, it is invigorating to see so much commitment and enthusiasm towards building and nurturing a multicultural and inclusive research community. In that sense, the settling in process was quite effortless and almost instantaneous.
Mittal Institute: What drove you to apply for this fellowship in the first place?
Nilanjana Mukherjee: I learned about Mittal Institute fellowships when attending a conference in New Delhi. After a few verbal, in person and virtual exchanges, as a mid-career researcher I was quite sure that this particular fellowship, namely the Bajaj Fellowship, would offer me the time and space to develop and carry forward a new research interest in the best possible manner. In the past, I have been a Visiting Fellow elsewhere in other institutes of great eminence, all of which have played critical roles in shaping my thinking and understanding. Moreover, since I am a full-time teacher, my obligations at times keep me from exploring new interdisciplinary facets, which I personally find interesting and compelling. Of course, there is no place more capable than Harvard to explore, nurture, foster, and develop an academic interest to its deliverable best.
For a postcolonial researcher and scholar like myself, an association with the Harvard University entails symbolic as well as functional significance. I strongly believe that a term in the intellectually stimulating environment of Harvard University, especially as a fellow attached with the Mittal Institute, can allow me to achieve my full potential in the current leg of my research focused on decolonial rethinking of spatiality, place making, travel and mobility studies.
I strongly believe that a term in the intellectually stimulating environment of Harvard University, especially as a fellow attached with the Mittal Institute, can allow me to achieve my full potential in the current leg of my research focused on decolonial rethinking of spatiality, place making, travel and mobility studies.
Mittal Institute: Your research interests center on the history of British imperial transactions in South Asia and its connections with the present. Can you share more about this focus, and how you first became interested in the field?
Nilanjana Mukherjee: You are absolutely right. My earlier work was on British cartographic transactions in South Asia. My present work is an extension of that earlier work, which made me see through a cartographic logic which creates places plausibly from abstract spaces: a defining feature of this is the making of the inside and the outside through fixing borders/boundaries. These borderlands are constructed as curious places with uneasy landscapes, imagined as mobility-impeding dangerous tracts of land which are impervious to spatial discipline, and peopled by unruly and deceitful tribes. There is recognizable visual magnificence in this, just as these are posed as difficult to traverse, adventurous locations in modern art and literature. Such imagery plays on ideas of distance and unknown, creating binarity with the proximate and known. The mountains, the seas, and especially the desert as landscapes operate with these views, although history testifies to them being otherwise. They are, in fact, connected spaces inhabited and traversed regularly, known and sung about since the earliest moments of recorded time in human history. This is about age-old human and animal mobility. According to me, it is worthwhile to remind ourselves about these old and forgotten routes, in order to understand the restructured myopic nature of the geopolitical world we find ourselves located in today, where issues regarding migration and borders are highly contestable.
Mittal Institute: For your Bajaj fellowship, you intend to explore the nature-human-animal dimension and its corresponding environmental concerns. Can you share more about this research project?
Nilanjana Mukherjee: When looking at certain landscapes, which figure as frontier zones and borderlands, one needs to address and incorporate environmental concerns of the terrain, especially when talking about arid areas with fragile ecology like the desert. For my present work, I intend to embrace fresh researches in environmental humanities in making an interdisciplinary study of the Thar Desert in northwest India, with a special focus on the history of nomadic peoples and how they (and their animals) develop and transmit a geography at odds with the colonial cartographic imagination. I want to see how nomadic life is constituted following a modern gaze, at times romanticized and in other, marginalized or invisibilized. One needs to evaluate a wasteland aesthetics, which frames such land in mainstream imaginations, in order to reassess larger global approaches and the optics of stadial development economics. In this context, I want to study certain nomadic and shepherd communities like the Raikas or Rabaris, who through their seasonal movements rewrite the space as they inhabit it, navigating routes and shaping landscapes propelled by the needs of their animals. The spatial mnemonics captured in songs and folklores could be one way to explore questions about alternative cartographic knowledge.
Nilanjana’s research project explores nomadic and shepherd communities in northwest India.
Mittal Institute: What other research are you working on?
Nilanjana Mukherjee: One of my longstanding wishes is to write a biography of my maternal grandfather, Sri Ardhendu Prasad Bandyopadhyay, a first generation Bengal School artist who trained at Kalabhavana, Santiniketan, under the tutelage of Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, and Nandalal Bose. Through a study of his existing corpus of paintings and letters, I want to understand the contemporary milieu, debates and discussions in the art world which fashioned ideas of nation and internationalism in key ways. This work keeps getting stalled because of personal entanglements and due to lack or loss of archival sources.
Mittal Institute: What aspect of your fellowship are you most looking forward to?
Nilanjana Mukherjee: I am extremely excited to collaborate with the profoundly knowledgeable Prof. Robin Kelsey, Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Art and Architecture in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. I feel I am indeed lucky to be working with him towards making a joint presentation of my research under his able guidance. When I read his writings, I found fresh ways of approaching my own work. I feel I gain each time I interact with him, from his gentle probing, encouragement, and key insights. Apart from that, I am really enjoying the opportunity of auditing courses to refresh and update my knowledge and in turn acquiring new pedagogic skills. Of course, to have Harvard’s enormous collection of library resources, from print to music and movies, at one’s disposal, is any scholar’s dream.
Mittal Institute: Post-fellowship, what are your career goals?
Nilanjana Mukherjee: Post-fellowship, I am going to return to my full-time teaching, hopefully with an updated skill set and of course with experiences and stories to share. I also intend to compile and share my research undertaken at Harvard through written publications in the form of articles. My wish also is to curate an online photo essay, including some striking images and video clips by reputed photographers and researchers who have worked closely with the nomadic communities in this area, and from whom I have learnt a lot.
☆ The views represented herein are those of the interview subject and do not necessarily reflect the views of LMSAI, its staff, or its steering committee.