Dipanjan Mazumder

Dipanjan Mazumder is a fifth year graduate student, working on the production of the local along the frontiers of empire in early modern South Asia. He was introduced to the discipline as an undergraduate student in Presidency College, Kolkata and thereafter was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jamia Millia Islamia, and the University of Delhi. Dipanjan’s MPhil thesis was entitled, “Circulation, Confrontation, and Identity formation in the North-West Frontier of the Delhi Sultanate”. This work critically read the discursive frontier in the Persian court chronicles of thirteenth-fourteenth century Delhi Sultanate to problematize the cultural production of a frontier in light of migration and self-fashioning of migrant Persian literati as refugees of the Mongol movement. It also aimed to engage the unilateral reading of the normative, cultural, and moral frontiers in the court chronicles by foregrounding the histories of resistance by groups like Khokhars who were often marginalised as ‘highway robbers’.

His present research focuses on the political, economic, and the cultural production of the ‘local’ along the edges of the successive empires in Bengal between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. Dipanjan received the Junior Research Fellowship from the Indian Council of Historical Research in 2016. Before joining Vanderbilt, he also served as a Research Associate for the project entitled, ‘Borderland Migration, Neo-liberal India and Borderland Identity’ funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research at the Centre for North East Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia.

His advisor is Professor Samira Sheikh.