Dr Nobonita Rakshit is the 2024-25 India Fellow at the Mittal Institute India office. She is working with Prof. Doris Sommer, Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies Department, Harvard University during her fellowship. Her project “Water Crisis, Hydropolitics, and Graphic Literature: Towards an Interdisciplinary Mapping of India’s Water War” will explore how the participatory art form of graphic narratives serves as a powerful response to India’s anthropogenic water crisis. Through an experimental amalgamation of scientific data and graphic art, an analysis of the selected Indian graphic novels will explore how graphical stories play crucial roles both in unveiling the historical consciousness of the postcolonial hydro-modernity and in framing water scarcity not as natural but as socio-political production in the late twentieth and twenty-first-century India.
Nobonita completed her PhD in English Literature from the Department of Humanities and Social Science, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. Her doctoral research titled “Environmental Crisis and Postcolonial South Asia: An Eco-aesthetic Reading of Contemporary South Asian Novels” studied how the contemporary South Asian novels through which the socially committed writers register these eco-social catastrophes and their traumatic aftermath—are capable of documenting the dialectic of postcolonial modernisation and catastrophic events and with experimental use of the aesthetics of realism. Nobonita’s research is primarily in the areas of is postcolonial studies, South Asian literature and culture, disaster narratives, and literature and environment studies. She holds an M.A. in English Literature from the Banaras Hindu University and a B. A (Hons) in English Literature from the University of Burdwan, West Bengal.
