Debajyoti Biswas

Bodoland University · Department of English

Assam has long experienced intercommunal tensions stemming from faulty colonial-era administrative policies, which have continued post-independence. Key instances of violence include the Language Movement (1960), the Medium of Instruction Movement (1972), and the Assam Movement (1979-1985). These conflicts, particularly over language, have intensif...

In his pathbreaking work Earth Emotions, Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht conceptualizes the term “solastalgia” to signify the mental discomfort or inner disquiet people endure when they experience profound changes in their surroundings, particularly the deterioration of landscapes with which they have strong emotional connection...

Abstract: To understand the Hindu consciousness of the environment, one will have to understand the essence of Hinduness. While Hindu is a term derived from Sindhu, a term of reference by the invaders for the people living on the banks of the Sindhu River, the people preferred calling themselves Sanatani, which implies an eternal and all-encompassi...

To understand the Hindu consciousness of the environment, one will have to understand the essence of Hinduness. While Hindu is a term derived from Sindhu, a term of reference by the invaders for the people living on the banks of the Sindhu River, the people preferred calling themselves Sanatani, which implies an eternal and all-encompassing form of...

The Environmental Humanities, or EH, is a multifaceted, relatively new, and swiftly evolving field of scholarship that integrates the theories and approaches of various disciplines—from anthropology, art, communications, cultural studies, philosophy and ecology to history, literature, media, music, performance, politics, sociology, theology and the...

Anuradha Sharma Pujari's Iyat Ekhon Aranya Asil is a powerful critique of the effect of modernity on postcolonial ecology. The novel explores the relationship between modern city life and the loss of animal habitat in the surrounding hills and forests. The unnamed narrator, a journalist by profession, has been strategically used as a mouthpiece of...

This article examines the trope of the ‘missing person’ in the literature about Kashmir and argues, by taking Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field (2019) as an example, how the trope allows the examination of a multilayered history of violence. The article problematises the idea of visibility and invisibility of the missing/abducted/hidden/underground peo...

Northeast India, home to diverse ethnic communities, has often been described as the cauldron of ethnic violence and insurgencies. The ongoing crisis in Manipur (in the form of a fratricidal war between the Meiteis and Kukis) and the State’s failure to contain it calls for deeper scrutiny of the geopolitics of the region. Whereas the region was onc...

Indigenous communities across the world and, more specifically, those of the Global South, are especially vulnerable to the effects of human-induced climate change. Standing at the crossroads of modernity and ancestral life, many communities face overwhelming losses of biocultural traditions along with their rightful homelands. Such loss has led to...

Citizen science is an emerging area that deals with the engagement of citizens in scientific projects. With the publication of Irwin’s Citizen Science: A Study of People, Expertise, and Sustainable Development, the objective of citizen science became pronounced. Thereafter, a good number of works have been done to chart out the objectives, methodol...

The planetary ecosystem is one of the most interconnected systems of all. But modern man's exploitation of natural resources has severely affected this ecosystem by taking a toll on its non-human counterparts. Much of this has happened under the garb of developmental projects designed by the capitalist economy initiated by European colonisers. At s...

The bovine has been the cause of conflict in the Indian sub-continent for the past few centuries owing to religious and cultural sentiments associated with it. This apparent irreconcilable conflict is localised in the binary of religious mannerism espoused by the religious groups in northern India, which is known as India’s cow belt. Such contradic...

Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse (2021) offers an incisive template of the intersecting history of Anthropocene and colonisation. The parables retold by Ghosh transport us to a sequestered past obscured by a Eurocentric discourse on colonial modernity. However, it is the same history which is now falling apart to reveal the devastating trajectory...

While the academic world talks of different waves of feminism that have emerged in Europe and the US in the past few centuries, the feminists from the third world countries have reservations on the use of a western framework of feminism in investigating the challenges faced by the women from third world countries. The structural discrimination that...

The paper discusses Mamani Raism Goswami’s The Moth Eaten Howda of the Tusker (2004) and Easterine Kire Iralu’s A Terrible Matriarchy (2011) with reference to the plight of women in North East India. Although the socio-cultural context of the novels varies from each other, the paper argues that the characters depicted in the fictions are connected...

The works of three writers from northeast India, Temsula Aos These Hills Called Home , Mamang Dais Stupid Cupid and Anjum Hasans Lunatic in my Head that cover the problem of identity in relation to the insider - outsider politics in the region are examined. The northeast India is in many ways a miniature India because it houses people from various...

This article analyses Aruni Kashyap’s short story collection His Father’s Disease. Kashyap challenges hegemonic structures through an emerging writing area tentatively classified as ‘Anglophone fiction from Northeast India’. By engaging with Foucault’s reading of Power/Knowledge this article examines the disciplining of literary regionalism (Anglop...

The construction of the idea of a race and racial prejudice has long been seen as detrimental to a progressive society. Racial stereotyping and domination of "inferior race" within the matrix of racial classification have led to violent atrocities around the world. In recent times the protest campaign #BlackLivesMatter after the killing of George F...

A cursory inquest into the effects of SARS-CoV-2 exposes how easily the ramification of the pandemic has moved over from the physio-social to the psychosocial state of humans all over the world. Derogatory nomenclatures such as ‘Chinese-virus’ or ‘Corona-jihad’ can be seen as a part of a disjunctive politics of ‘representation’ as opposed to ‘repre...

According to Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, India has the most stringent lockdown as compared to other nations and has scored 100% in the scale; nevertheless, there had been sporadic incidence of attacks on police personnel and medical workers in different parts of India. This article argues that such resistance comes from two broad f...