Dr. Chandrima Chakraborty

Dr. Chandrima Chakraborty’s initial contributions to scholarship have been through her investigations of the complex and intimate relations among religion, masculinity, and nationalism in India, explored in specific instances of literature, film, and media. Her first book, Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India (2011) was followed by Mapping South Asian Masculinities (2015), which examines critical historical events in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora conceptualizing history as differentiated encounters among bodies, cultures, and nations, through the frame of political crises. Her coedited anthology, Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning is the result of her ongoing research on the 1985 Air India bombings. It brings together international scholars, Air India family members, creative writers, and visual artists in thinking through the complex processes of mourning and memorialization that have ensued in the aftermath of the 1985 Air India bombings.

Chakraborty has refocussed the attention of the scholarly community as well as the Canadian (and global) public on the 1985 Air India bombings, initiating the first scholarly efforts to consolidate research on the subject with an edited feature section in TOPIA (2012). In May 2016, Chakraborty co-organized an international conference, funded by SSHRC, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Air India disaster with her graduate students. This event brought together for the first time the families of those who had perished in the Air India crash, scholars from around the globe, Canadian artists, and writers, and interested members of the public to engage in a conversation about this little-remembered event in Canadian history and public memory and reflect on its impact on our shared present. She has been conducting interviews with Air India family members and gathering materials from family members and other critical witnesses for the first-ever archival collection and open online archive on Air India, engaging McMaster Library as the repository, thereby creating a public site for memorialization and ongoing research.

Chakraborty has published essays on: postcolonial theory; globalization and Hindu asceticism; religion and nationalism; Canadian multiculturalism; racial violence and racial grief; Indian, Caribbean, and South Asian Canadian writers and artists; and Bollywood cinema. Her work has appeared in journals such as ARIEL, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Studies in Canadian Literature, Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of the History of Sport and Postcolonial Text.

She holds the title of University Scholar at McMaster University and is a member of the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.

Member, Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists | Professional

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