Debarati Bagchi is a Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director at the MWF Delhi. Debarati’s PhD (Delhi University) dissertation Many Spaces of Sylhet: Making of a Regional Identity explored the agrarian and cultural histories of frontiers and borderlands in colonial Northeast India. Post-PhD, Debarati’s area of research shifted towards the history and sociology of education. She has completed two postdoctoral projects, one on the connection between language and mass education and the other on education and urban transformation. Currently, she is working on the history of production and regulation of textbooks in India. She is also writing and co-editing a series of alternative history books in Bengali for middle school children.
Areas of Research Interest
- History and sociology of education
- Pedagogy, curricula, textbooks
- Public history
- Language education and linguistic politics
- Privatisation of education and urban transformation
- Histories of frontiers and borderlands in colonial India
Ongoing Research Project
Controlling the Curricula: Textbook Regulation in India, 1870s – 2000s
Since the formation of the first Central textbook Committee in Bengal in 1875, various actors and institutions have debated the power of district and central committees in recognising and de-recognising school textbooks, ways of regulating the production of textbooks, and the share of responsibility between the state and private publishers. In post-independence India, the tussles over these questions of jurisdiction and control on textbook production and curriculum designing overlapped with the cultural tensions between the nation and the region, the centre and the states. Privatisation of education added new layers to the story. Also, textbook controversies became integral to the discourse on school pedagogy in post-independence India. Every time there was a change in the ruling government, textbooks—particularly social science and humanities textbooks—turned into battlegrounds of competing ideologies. This project wishes to situate these moments in the longer history of institutionalisation of curricula and textbooks in India, with a focus on colonial and post-independence Bengal. Archival research will be juxtaposed with an ethnography of textbook markets in West Bengal to understand the overlapping histories of state regulation and market control in the domain of pedagogy.
Ongoing Collaborative Project
Revisiting the Craft of History Writing for Children
A project of the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK). Debarati Bagchi is a collaborator, author, and series co-editor.
The project involves the writing and publication of a series of illustrated history books for children, 12 to 14 years of age. Children’s encounter with the past is often shaped by the stories, notions and symbols of the societies, communities and nation-states that they learn to see as sacrosanct. They internalise patriarchal, majoritarian and statist values from their social surroundings and even from the formal spaces of education. This project intends to write lucid and accessible history books for middle-school children in India that will unsettle such ideas by creatively revisiting the ways of learning history. Through the series Itihase Hatekhari [First History Lessons], we wish to disseminate the understanding of and the need for critical histories among young kids. The books are written in Bengali and translated into English and Assamese. The authors and editors are trained historians. The first three books published in 2022 dealt with the questions of partition, citizenship, and language politics. In 2023, we wrote and published three more books on the histories of commodity (tea), environment (river) and war. The final set of books of 2024 are on food, attire, and sports.
Completed Research Project
Education Hubs and The Changing Rural-Urban Interface: The Emergence of an ‘Education City’ in the National Capital Region, India
While education studies and urban studies have flourished as rich areas of research in South Asia, the interface between education and the urban has received little scholarly attention. The literature on land question in India, both in the fields of agrarian and urban studies, rarely mention the histories of land acquisition for universities. The project drew attention to issues such as land and locality in the study of higher education. I argued that from the early 2000s, the domain of higher education in India witnessed a phenomenal shift that fostered a very specific relationship between education, land acquisition, and urbanization. This enabled a certain discourse on the linkages between the land market and the education market. The project reflected on the land–university nexus on the northern, agrarian fringes of Delhi by examining an instance of land acquisition for an elite education hub, the Rajiv Gandhi Education City (RGEC). The project focused on the education hub as a site for studying ‘frontier urbanism’ and the entanglements of the agrarian and the urban in South Asia. A paper based on the findings of the project will be published in 2024 in Geetha B. Nambissan, Nandini Manjrekar, Indra Sengupta and Shivali Tukdeo (eds.) Shifting Landscapes: Education and Urban Transformations in India. New Delhi: Routledge.
Publications
Bagchi, Debarati. 2024. Review of the book The Nation’s Got Talent: Education, Experimentation and Policy Discourses in India by Rachel Philip, Contemporary Education Dialogue, 21(1): 130–134.
Bagchi, Debarati. 2023. ‘Education Centres and Urban Change in the Delhi-National Capital Region in India’, MWS Themenportal (blog), https://www.maxweberstiftung.de/themenportal/ beitraege/bildungszentren-und-staedtischer-wandel-in-der-delhi-national-capital-region-in-indien.html
Bagchi, Debarati. 2023. Itihase Hatekhari: Nadir Chola (First History Lessons: The Flow of Rivers). Kolkata: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung–Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK). [Alternative history book for middle school children published as part of the project ‘Revisiting the craft of history writing for children]
Bagchi, Debarati. 2022. Itihase Hatekhari: Desher Bhasha (First History Lessons: The Languages of the Country). Kolkata: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung-Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK). [Alternative history book for middle school children published as part of the project ‘Revisiting the craft of history writing for children]
Bagchi, Debarati. 2022. ‘Upanibesher Jami-Jangal, Krishi-Paribesh’, in Pratyay Nath, Kaustubh Mani Sengupta (eds), Itihaser Bitarka, Bitarker Itihas: Atiter Bharat O Ajker Gabeshana. Kolkata: Ananda Publishers.
Bagchi, Debarati. 2021. Education Hub in Sonipat: Exploring Land-University Nexus in the National Capital Region, Working Paper No. 12, Education and the Urban in India, Max Weber Stiftung-GHI London. https://doi.org/10.25360/01-2021-00006
Bagchi, Debarati 2019. Review of the book Language as Identity in Colonial India: Policies and Politics by Papia Sengupta, South Asian History and Culture, 10(4): 474–477.
Bagchi, Debarati. 2018. ‘Migration, Street-dwelling and City Space: Women Waste-pickers’, in Ranabir Samaddar (ed.), Migrants and the Neoliberal City. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.
Bagchi, Debarati. 2017. ‘The Shifting Logics of Reorganisation: Defining Identities and their Borders in Colonial Sylhet’, Refugee Watch: A South Asian Journal on Forced Migration, 49: 78–94.
Bagchi, Debarati and Mitra, Iman Kumar. 2017. ‘Life, Labour, Recycling: A Study of Waste Management Practices in Contemporary Kolkata’, in Ranabir Samaddar, Samita Sen and Iman Kumar Mitra (eds), Accumulation in Postcolonial Capitalism. Singapore: Springer.
Bagchi, Debarati. 2016. ‘Street Dwelling and City Space: Women Waste Pickers in Kolkata’, Economic and Political Weekly, 51(26-27): 63–68.
Forthcoming Publications
Bagchi, Debarati. (Forthcoming). ‘University and Urban Transformation: Reflections on an Education City in the National Capital Region’, in Geetha B. Nambissan, Nandini Manjrekar, Indra Sengupta and Shivali Tukdeo (eds), Shifting Landscapes: Education and Urban Transformations in India. New Delhi: Routledge.
Bagchi, Debarati and Sengupta, A. (Forthcoming). Alternative History Books for Children in Bengali: A Reflection on Writing and Reception. In Katharina Poltze and Birte Schröder (eds), Putting Knowledge(s) into Perspective? Knowledge, Reflexivity and (Multi-)Perspectivity in Educational Media. Göttingen: V&R Unipress.
Bagchi, Debarati. (Forthcoming). Itihase Hatekhari: Poshakashak (First History Lessons: Attire). Kolkata: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung South Asia (RLS) and Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK). [Alternative history book for middle school children to be published as part of the project ‘Revisiting the craft of history writing for children’]