Priya Mukherjee & Baijayanti Chatterjee: Joint Seminar with CASI Fall Visiting Scholars

"Power of the State: Police Careers, Political Turnover, and Public Order in India"
Priya Mukherjee

More info coming soon!
 

"Ecology, Vulnerability and Livelihoods: Riverine Chars as Symbols of Destabilization in Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s Kalindi & Abu Ishaque’s Padmar"
Baijayanti Chatterjee

Ever since Donald Worster’s seminal works on the massive exploitation of rivers by modern empires, there has been a rich body of scholarship on how human technological feats have, in different spatiotemporal contexts, harnessed the power of water. Significant historiographical departures, however, have emerged more recently, particularly in the context of the “volatile hydrographic regimes of Europe’s tropical colonies,” where, despite the colonial claims of mastering water, it was never fully controlled. In the context of the riverine regions of South Asia—like Bengal, which until 1947, included West Bengal and the now sovereign state of Bangladesh—chars or alluvial sandbanks act as great destabilizers. Part-land and part-water chars are the classic embodiment of Michael Foucault’s notion of “heterotopias” due to their juxtaposition of incompatible spaces. These alluvial landforms rise temporarily from river-beds only to disappear at the whim of the monsoon rivers. Despite their temporal fluidity, the emergence of chars, as valuable cultivable land, was of great import to marginalized ecosystem-dependent communities, often resulting in bloody feuds and fatal conflicts over their possession. While these micro-level conflicts do not always enter into the historical archive, they animate twentieth-century Bengali fiction that provides an impeccably realistic account of the economic policies of the colonial state, the changing traditional social structure of rural Bengal and struggles of the choruas or char-inhabitants amidst these changes. Taking two Bengali novels representative of the genre—Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s Kalindi, based on the riverine region of the Rarh or West Bengal and Abu Ishaque’s Padmar Palidwip (The Alluvial Islands of River Padma), based on deltaic East Bengal—as points of entry into the lives and livelihood practices of choruas, this seminar looks at the complex interplay between humans, their environment, and power structures. At the same time, it also underscores the daily struggles, resilience, and adaptability of the subaltern communities inhabiting these volatile landscapes. 

Priya Mukherjee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Research Fellow at IZA/LISER-Institute of Labor Economics, and a CASI Fall 2026 Visiting Scholar. She is a development economist whose research examines the political economy of development, with a particular focus on governance and political institutions, human capital, and gender. Her work uses experimental and quasi-experimental methods and spans India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Her research on India examines how political institutions and public policy shape economic and social outcomes. Current projects include work on policing and state capacity in India, including the career trajectories and deployment of Indian Police Service officers, and a new longitudinal study that will follow households in urban India over time to study economic mobility, human capital, and interactions with the state. During her time at CASI, Mukherjee will advance this research agenda on institutions, governance, and long-run development in India.

Baijayanti Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor of History at Seth Anandram Jaipuria College, University of Calcutta, and a CASI Fall 2026 Visiting Scholar. Having completed her BA in History from Presidency College she pursued her MA, MPhil, and PhD from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her work lies at the intersections of environmental and socio-economic history. Focusing on the region of Bengal in the late-eighteenth century, her research attempts to understand the key role played by rivers in molding the region’s economy through a focus on agricultural production, trade, and transport that was overwhelmingly dependent on Bengal’s fluvial topography. Her work has been supported by the Indian Council of Historical Research and the Charles Wallace India Trust through the award of two research grants in 2016 and 2023 for archival research in the UK. Dr. Chatterjee has also presented portions of her ongoing research at Columbia University (2017), Kings’ College London (2019) and the University of Stavanger (2022) among other places. She has published in numerous journals including the Indian Historical Review, Bengal Past and Present, Global Environment and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. Her current research interest lies in the genre of Bengali river fictions that offer significant insights on the history of the Bengal region but have hitherto received only limited academic attention.