Associate Professor

Baidik Bhattacharya trained in English literary studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (MA and MPhil) and Oxford University (DPhil). He taught in the English departments of Newcastle University (2006-10) and Delhi University (2010-2018) prior to joining CSDS.

In a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field, his recent book Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters (Cambridge University Press, 2024) argues that global literary culture since the eighteenth century was fundamentally shaped by colonial histories. It offers a comprehensive account of the colonial inception of the literary sovereign – how the realm of literature was thought to be separate from history and politics – and then follows that narrative through a wide array of different cultures, multilingual archives, and geographical locations. Providing close studies of colonial archives, German philosophy of aesthetics, French realist novels, and English literary history, this book shows how colonialism shaped and reshaped modern literary cultures in decisive ways. It breaks fresh ground across disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, history, and philosophy, and invites one to rethink the history of literature in a new light.

His first book, Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations (Routledge, 2018), explores the debates surrounding two dynamic fields-postcolonial studies and world literature. Contrary to many dominant narratives in critical theory, the book asserts that as an analytical framework the idea of world literature is dead: the nineteenth-century ideal of world literature had always and already been embedded in colonial histories; and, in our contemporary times, the promise of that ideal has been exhausted by postcolonial Anglophone literature. Through fresh and incisive readings of the postcolonial canon and some of its most prominent authors like Rudyard Kipling, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the volume discusses how these Anglophone writings have used the banal and ordinary ideal of world literature to fashion out their own trajectories.

Bhattacharya is the co-editor of two volumes: Baidik Bhattacharya and Sambudha Sen (eds.) Novel Formations: The Indian Beginnings of a European Genre (Permanent Black, 2018); Baidik Bhattacharya and Neelam Srivastava (eds.) The Postcolonial Gramsci (Routledge, 2012).

His essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Boundary 2, Modern Philology, Novel, Interventions, Postcolonial Studies, among other places. He has contributed essays to numerous edited volumes.

Bhattacharya has held visiting scholarships at ICAS:MP, the University of Virginia and the University of Western Cape. He has been part of the teaching faculty of Harvard University’s Institute for World Literature in 2020 and 2022.

Email: baidik(at)csds.in

Select Publications (Click to Read)

On Comparatism in the Colony: Archives, Methods, and the Project of Weltliteratur

Somapolitics: A Biohermeneutic Paradigm in the Era of Empire

Reading Rancière: Literature at the Limit of World Literature