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Dr. Atreyee Majumder

Associate Professor, Social Science

Teaching

Academic Programmes

5-Year B.A., LL.B. (Hons.)

Courses

Nov 2024

Mar 2024

July 2023

Mar 2023

Nov 2022

Mar 2022

Nov 2021

Elective Course | Religion and Society

Education

BA LLB (Hons.), National Law School of India University – 2006
PhD, Sociocultural Anthropology, Yale University – 2014
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto – 2016-18

Profile

Atreyee is an anthropologist of South Asia. Her scholarship examines topics related to late capitalism, hinterland urbanisms, time, space, scale and most recently religion, through the tradition of Krishna worship in northern India, commonly called Bhakti. Her research has been consistently supported by competitive grants including the American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Research Grant (2011-12). In October 2023, she was awarded the Wenner-Gren Post-PhD Grant for her ethnographic research on contemporary lives of Bhakti. She is also co-PI in a Design Phase Grant from DASRA (US) at NLS for a research-driven advocacy project on women lawyers in India. She has consistently published scholarly articles, and has written in popular venues, on these issues. She is also a published poet, and dabbles in the violin.

Research Work

Her current research on the devotional tradition of Bhakti braids with her own fraught spiritual journey to interrogate devotional self-making in Vrindavan and the surrounding towns in northern India known as the Braj region. Focusing on the public life of devotion in the region, her ongoing ethnography, asks: What shape and texture does religious devotion take in the backdrop of late capitalism? It seeks to understand how the everyday contemplation of the divine exists with and despite forces of late capitalism (like digital mediation of religiosity, smartphone use and so on) in ambivalence. She interprets this ambivalence as a kind of urban, secular melancholia – as if devotees contemplate the absence of the god in a sentiment of longing/separation (biraha). The breaking of inside/outside divides is the fulcrum of this study. The urban milieu, the crumbling architecture of temples, the buzzing kitsch marketplaces, the signage on faces, signboards, speech and song, are all signposts indicating an inner journey towards a beyond. Vrindavan and its urban surround grow into a melancholic milieux that penetrate this inside-outside boundary, even as she, the ethnographer, traverses it, with surprise, excitement, fear, shock, and anxiety.

To know more about her current research, read her interview here.

Publications

Books

Book Chapters

Journal Articles

Popular Media