
Dr Payel Chattopadhyay Mukherjee
Nominated Fellow, June-July 2024
Home Institution: Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIITD)
Dr Payel Chattopadhyay Mukherjee works on the ideas/problems of how one sees the nation, concept of a nation, and theoretical ideas on nationalism. Her focus areas of research are postcolonial theories through particular histories of colonial empire in India and literary works, Intellectual debates among early 20th century Indian thinkers, Rabindranath Tagore, South Asian Studies. She is a Faculty Member at the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, IIIT Delhi and an Adjunct Professor, Department of English, University of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Project title: Rabindranath Tagore and his West: Connections, Counterparts, Cosmopolitan-nationalism
In my proposed monograph on Rabindranath Tagore, I connect his complex individualism to his collective and dialogic agency. Tagore evolves as an essential node in pluralistic rethinking, with profound reflections on the emergence of nationalism in India and the evolving cosmopolitan interconnectedness with the West. Tagore’s positional historicity inspires an intentional reading in context, forming my archive and my site of analysis. Various archival sources of Tagore are integral to this study of the West as a performative discourse, emergent through published writings, letters, public and private correspondence, and other records of figures, including Yeats, Pound, Rothenstein, and Geddes. These materials will be the focus of my planned monograph, Tagore and his West. A key chapter will have to do with the Scottish sociologist and urban planner Patrick Geddes, which shall be the primary focus of my research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The University of Edinburgh.