I work in the areas of intimate relations and personal life. My doctoral dissertation focused on the emerging nature of coupling in arranged marriage and marriages of choice and their relations with homosocial spaces of friendships in urban Kolkata. My interests span other domains of intimate relations, including mother-child relationships, loss and memorialisation, narrative practices, feminist theory, and gender studies. The interdisciplinary nature of my work draws primarily upon post-structuralist thought and French theory. My recent work engages critically with themes of memory, temporality, partition histories, and women's experiences. It focuses on the complex interplays of gender, identity, and power that shape personal and social realities.
I am a performing artist and a singer song writer in Borno Anonyo, a musical ensemble. The music is rooted firmly in urban Bengal, but with bridges across space and time that allow its tendrils to connect with literary modernism, mystic traditions, children’s rhymes, cinema, theatre and protest movements. It is marked by the repeated insistence of ideas on loss, longing, internal exile, and the ever incomplete journey of homecoming. My academic interest in memory studies and intimate relations of mother-child bond find an echo in the songs that I perform and write as a musician. Borno Anonyo, in the last couple of years of the pandemic, has often put their performances to raise funds and support community kitchens in Bengal, the lockdown affected Baul Fakir artists of Bolpur, Shantiniketan and the farmers’ movement in India.
BA Sociology (Presidency University, 2005)
MA Sociology (University of Calcutta, 2007)
PhD Sociology (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, 2013)
After completing PhD in Sociology from the University of Birmingham in 2013, I joined Presidency University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. I have been teaching there for the past 11 years in the areas of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Personal Life and Intimate Relations and, Philosophy of the Everyday.
Negotiating intimate heterosexual identities and relations: narratives of three generations of urban middle-class Bengalis living in Kolkata, India
Through interview generated narratives of subjects of three generations of urban middle-class Bengalis living in Kolkata, India and other auto-ethnographic narrative texts; this research seeks to examine generation, gender and class specific meanings of intimate heterosexual identities and relations. It focuses on the ways in which subjects negotiate institutionalized heterosexuality or hetero-normativity within everyday practices of intimacy. Subjects’ on-going negotiations that tell stories of multiple and contradictory subjectivities, are analysed to show how personal narratives of intimacy vary across a range of conflicting and competing colonialist, nationalist and trans-nationalist discourses of heterosexuality. Through analysing stories of homosocial intimacy, heterosexual coupling and expressions of intimacy; the research examines the power and vulnerability of ‘doing gender’, illustrates how ‘practices of intimacy’ overlap with ‘family practices’ and demonstrates that expressions of intimacy are socially ordered and linguistically mediated. The research critiques the ‘individualization thesis’ of reflexive modernization by showing how practices of intimacy are socio-culturally embedded within family relations, both real and imagined. By appreciating multiple meanings of power and agency, it also critiques a colonial-modernist notion of linear progress by illustrating the shifting meaning and the mutual co-constitution of the categories of ‘past’ and ‘present’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modern’, ‘East’ and ‘West’.
I am currently working on friendship and the cultural discourse of Adda in Bengal.
I am also editing a book on ‘Kumudini Trust: An Intimate History of Gender, Care, and Capital in Post-Partition Bengal’ as part of a project funded by Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh (2022-24).
Administrative Experience:
I am currently working as the Convenor of the Gender Sensitisation and Prevention of Sexual Harrasment Cell (GSPSHC) (2023-present)
Member of the Election Committee of the University (2013-14)
I am currently teaching at both UG and PG level at Presidency University
Courses that I am currently teaching are:
1. Everyday Life (UG)
2. Gender and Society (UG)
3. Intimate Relations Optional (PG)
4. Gender and Sexuality (PG)
Previous expereriences:
Seminar Tutor for the Gender and Sexuality module with Department of POLSIS, University of Birmingham
Part time lecturer of Sociology with Murulidhar Girls' College, Calcutta, India
Faculty of Sociology with Institute for Civil Service Aspirants, India
Faculty of Sociology with Triumphant Institute of Management Education, India
Currently I am supervising doctoral students pursuing the following research topics:
1. Exploring Family and Intimacy: Narratives of Cohabiting Couples in Kolkata (Ms. Anwesha kar)
2. Understanding the Politics of Performance: Launda Naach and its Journeys. (Mr. Rahul Baidh)
3. Tiger Widows of Sundarban: An Ethnographic Study (Ms. Annehsa Majumdar)
Das, Nabamita (2024), "Motherhood and Modernity in Rabindranath Tagore" in Sudarshana Sen (Ed), Women in Bengal: In Reality and Through Representations, New York: Taylor and Francis
Das, Nabamita (2023) “Leela Mazumdar: A Silence That Chimes”. In Gender and Naxalite Movement: An Introspection, edited by Pradip Basu, 8-33. Kolkata: Setu Prakashani
Das, Nabamita (2019), Symbols of Heterosexual Marriage and Negotiations of Heteronormativity: Narratives of Three Generations of Urban Middle Class
Social Trends, Journal of the Department of sociology, North Bengal University, Volume 6, 31, Pages 46-59
Presidency University Students Corner