Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (Victoria University of Wellington)

submitted: Mon, 5 Dec 1994 13:42:27 +0500

Dr Sekhar Bandyopadhyay
Senior Lecturer, Department of History
Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand

phones: 04-471-5344 (office)
        04-476-3842 (residence)
Fax:    04-471-2070 
email:  Sekhar.Bandyopadhyay@vuw.ac.nz

Description of work:

My research interest has been primarily in caste, social mobility and
nationalist politics in colonial India, with special reference to
Bengal.The period that I have worked on covers mainly the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. My doctoral dissertation on this subject has
been published as 'Caste, Politics and the Raj: Bengal 1872-1937',
(Calcutta: KP Bagchi & Co., 1990). I have also been the co-editor of two
other  books on related subjects: (1) 'Caste and Communal Politics in South
Asia', [Co-editor: Suranjan Das], (Calcutta: KP Bagchi & Co. 1993); and (2)
'Bengal: Communities, Development and States', [Co-editors: Abhijit
Dasgupta and Willem van Schendel], (New Delhi: Manohar, 1994).

I am at present engaged in research on the social protest movement among an
untouchable caste of Bengal, known as the Namasudras. I am tracing the
history of this agricultural community from 1872 to 1947. Apart from caste,
I have also written on social reform movements in colonial Bengal, such as
the movement for widow remarriage in mid-nineteenth century. I am also
interested in Hindu-Muslim relations and communal politics in colonial
India and more particularly in Bengal. 

So far as teaching is concerned, I am at present offering two
under-garaduate courses and one graduate seminar course in Indian history.
Of the two under-graduate courses, one is a general survey course on the
history of modern India from mid-eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries and
the other is a more specialised course on  nationalism in modern India from
c1885 to 1947. The graduate course is on religion, caste and nation
building in India during the colonial period.