Tapan Basu

Biography

My primary area of academic interest is nineteenth and twentieth century American Literature, proceeding out of my engagement with courses which I enjoyed most during my MA and MPhil Studies at the Department of English, University of Delhi. My enjoyment of courses in American Literature derived, in no small measure, from the pedagogic genius of the legendary professor, Professor A.N. Kaul, under whose tutelage I was introduced to the discipline. Subsequently however, for my PhD work from the same department, I went beyond the boundaries of the predominantly WASP -male canon of texts, a neo-Matthessenian canon, that had constituted the warp and woof of Professor Kaul’s definition of American Literature, by choosing of focus upon the novels of three now-canonical Black American writers, namely, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. From an extended involvement in the study of Black American writings, I have, in more recent years, been drawn into an exploration of the writings of the Indian Dalits. The similarity, in many ways, of the social predicaments of the Indian Dalits and the Black Americans, whose everyday existence in their respective contexts is subject to comparable structures of oppression, has been remarked upon by a host of scholars of social marginality. Likewise, cultural critics have attempted to examine, in juxtaposition with each other, the modes and mores of self-expression of members of these at once disparate but analogous social constituencies. I have been keeping abreast of studies already undertaken in this direction and hope to follow up on them by an investigation into the mutual influences and interactions in the arena of cultural expression that might have brought these constituencies together, from time to time, through their common concerns. My current intellectual pre-occupation is with the impact on the cultural expression of the erstwhile untouchable communities of India of the Ambedkarite movement in general and in particular of the figure of Dr. Ambedkar himself as a signifier of radical emancipation from caste subordination.

Research Interest

Nineteenth and Twentieth Century American Literature, Literature of the Black Americans, Dalit Writings, The Cultural Politics of Caste and Communal Identity – Definitions in Contemporary India, Indian Writing in English.