Rochona Majumdar

Rochona Majumdar

Assistant Professor
Office: Foster Hall 213
Phone: (773) 834-2966
Fax: (773) 834-3254
Email: r-majumdar@uchicago.edu

Rochona Majumdar (PhD 2003, University of Chicago) is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century India. Her Book Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal, 1870-1956 (Duke University Press, 2009) analyzes the changing configuration of the "joint family" in the context of shifts in the institution of arranged marriage and the marriage market in Bengal. She is a co-editor with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Andrew Sartori of From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Majumdar is currently completing a book entitled Writing Postcolonial History which analyzes ways in which postcolonial theory has influenced the historian's craft. She is also engaged in a longer-term research project on the history of Indian cinema.

Majumdar teaches courses on Indian cinema, histories of gender, love, and marriage in South Asia, and modern Indian history.

Education

Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2003

Field Specialties

History of gender, sexuality, and family in India; history of Indian cinema; social, cultural, and intellectual history of Bengal and Bangladesh; postcolonial history.

Publications Include

Books

  • Writing Postcolonial History. (forthcoming 2010).
  • Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal. Durham: Duke University press, 2009.
  • Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009.
  • From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition. Editors, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar & Andrew Sartori, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Articles

  • "Debating radical cinema: A history of the film society movement in India," Modern Asian Studies (forthcoming). Available online at Modern Asian Studies, FirstView Article : pp 1-37. 
  • "A Conceptual History of the Social: Some Reflections from Colonial Bengal," in Michael Dodson and Brian Hatcher edited, Transcolonial Modernities in South Asia (London: Routledge), forthcoming, June 2012.
  • With Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Gandhi’s Gita and Politics As Such," Modern Intellectual History, volume 7: 2, pp. 335-353.
  • "Marriage, Family, and Property in India: A Colonial Genealogy," South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 1: 3, pp. 397-415.
  • "Family Values in Transition: Debates on the Hindu Code Bill," in From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition. Editors, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar & Andrew Sartori, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.
  • With Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Mangal Pandey: Film and history," Economic and Political Weekly, Special Issue on 1857, April 15, 2007, pp. 1771- 1778. Reprinted in 1857: Essays from Economic and Political Weekly, Orient Longman, 2008, pp. 303-328.
  • "Snehalata’s Death: Dowry and Women’s Agency in Colonial Bengal," The Indian Economic and Social History Review, October-December, 41:4, 2004, pp. 433-464.
  • "Looking for Brides and Grooms: Ghataks, Matrimonials and the Marriage Market in Bengal, c. 1875- 1940," Journal of Asian Studies, November, 2004, pp. 911-935.
  • "History of Women’s Rights: A Non-Historicist Reading," Economic and Political Weekly, 30 May, 2003, pp. 2130- 2134.
  • "Self-Sacrifice versus Self-Interest: A Non-Historicist Reading of the History of Women’s Rights in India," in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. XXII, Nos. 1-2, 2002, pp. 20- 36.
  • "Writing the Self: Rassundari Dasi’s Amar Jiban", in The Calcutta Historical Journal, Volumes XIX-XX (combined), pp. 13- 34.

Review Essays (peer reviewed)

  • Love and Marriage in the Public Sphere, Journal of Women's History (forthcoming)
  • "Arguments within Indian Feminism" Social History, Volume 32 - Issue 4 - November 2007 - pp. 434 – 445.
  • "Understanding Marriage Dowry," http://www.history-compass.com, 2004, no. 2.

Courses Taught

On Cinema:

  • Bollywood and Beyond
  • A historical introduction to Indian Cinema
  • Radical Cinema in India: An Introduction

On Gender:

  • Love, Conjugality, and Capital: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and India (co-taught with Jennifer Cole)
  • Liberalism and Feminism in India
  • Problems in the Study of Gender
  • Problems in the Study of Sexuality

On Indian History:

  • South Asian Civilizations
  • Critics of Inequality in India
  • South Asia as an Unit of Study

Related Links