Research

This project considers a cluster of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and media objects in the Anglophone tradition in conjunction with developments and breakthroughs in computing and cognitive neurosciences in order to study the emergence of a new form of life in literature and media alongside its real-world counterparts in life-extension laboratory facilities, distributed digital networks, and tech-firms whose substrate is neither fully carbon nor fully silicon. The project is invested in interrogating and understanding the constitution of the biodigital life in parallel with the increasing exteriorization of human cognition over the past seventy-five years, afforded by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, from the Turing machine to the Transformer architecture in large language models.

This project reads narrative accounts—from memoirs written by individuals who have recovered from brain diseases to case histories of neurological patients—of degeneration and recovery along with medical documents to consider the cultural and narrative divides between laboratory findings and clinical/social practices, and the increasing translational traffics in recent times in the medical and health humanities between these domains. The project combines the study of the scientific underpinnings of disease memoirs with cultural readings of scientific documents to uncover the rhetorics at play in medicine, care, and assistance.

This broad track concerns itself with a wide range of materials—reports by British medical officers, articles of various types in Assamese magazines and periodicals, works of fiction dealing with medicine and health in the region—to gain a better understanding of the intersection of health and medicine in this part of India, where I was born and where I lived for decades.

My current focus is on the relationship between hunting and resource extraction in Undivided Assam. Figures of interest include nitib shikaris like Tarun Ram Phukan and Prasannalal Choudhury, and European hunters like Frank Nicholls and Patrick Hanley, who operated in the region. Here, my interest extends into the Assam-Burma connection.

The rich history of speculative fiction in Assamese, which begins in the Ābāhana period, has been an abiding interest. From early, rather simplistic narratives of drug induced hallucinations to more sophisticated engagements with developments in bioengineering and neuroscience in works produced around the turn of the century, SF in Assamese as a broad genre has come to attain a thematic complexity that demands serious interdisciplinary approaches. An article on the brain-computer interface in contemporary Assamese SF is currently under preparation. I’m also working on a public-facing piece that traces the genealogy of writings in Assamese on gerontology and life extention. Additionally, I’m building a go-to website on Assamese SF, which should go live by 2026.