Research

This project examines narrative accounts—from memoirs by individuals who have recovered from brain diseases to case histories of neurological patients—alongside medical documents to explore the cultural and narrative distinctions between laboratory findings and clinical or social practices. It also considers the growing exchanges in recent medical and health humanities research between these domains. By combining the study of the scientific foundations of disease memoirs with cultural analyses of scientific texts, the project seeks to uncover the rhetorical strategies shaping 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 discursive 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.

I approach translation both as a theorist and a translator; and seek to examine the historical and contemporary landscape of translation within the Assamese literary/cultural ecosystem, and map the institutional networks, material infrastructures—print culture, magazines/periodicals and publishing houses, digital platforms—and regional/transnational mediations that have historically shaped vernacular knowledge production. Currently, I’m looking at how translation functioned as a vital site for cultural encounter and intellectual formation in a number of children’s magazines: Mōuchāq, Xofurā, Natun Ābiskār.