Dr. Rochona Majumdar

Biography

Rochona Majumdar is a historian of modern India with a focus on Bengal. Her writings span histories of gender and sexuality, Indian cinema, especially art cinema and film music, and modern Indian intellectual history. Majumdar writes on postcolonial history and theory. Her book, "Marriage Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal," challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Through extensive archival research, she demonstrates that Bengali marriage practices underwent changes during the late colonial period that led to the valorization of the larger, intergenerational family, regarded as a revered social institution linked to arranged marriage as an apotheosis of “Indian” tradition. This book was shortlisted for the International Convention of Asia Scholars (Social Science short-list) in 2011. Majumdar's interests in postcoloniality have led to her work, "Writing Postcolonial History," which analyzes the impact of postcolonial theory on historiography. Her book "Art Cinema: India's Forgotten Futures: Film History in the Postcolony" provides an analysis of global art cinema in independent India. Majumdar teaches and writes on conceptual intellectual history and is involved in projects addressing subalternity, postcolonialism, and contemporary movements for decolonization. She has served as a faculty fellow at the Franke Institute for Humanities and as a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Emotions in Berlin and the IWM in Vienna. Majumdar also writes for publications such as the Indian Express, Daily O, and Anandabazar Patrika (in Bengali).

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