I studied English Honours at Presidency College, Calcutta; and did both my Masters and Ph.D from Calcutta University. I specialized in Indian-English literature; and for my doctoral thesis, explored the evolution of the trope of Partition in English fiction of the subcontinent, from the mid-1950s to the late-1980s. I was awarded two Fellowships by the UGC while working on my Ph.D in India – a student Junior Research Fellowship (JRF), and a teacher Fellowship under the Faculty Improvement Program (FIP) of the Xth Plan. From 2001-2007, I taught English Literature in a full-time, permanent capacity, in an undergraduate college (Basanti Devi) in Kolkata.
I left my tenured position to join my husband in The Netherlands. While there, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden and Amsterdam, and authored two books – South Asian Partition Fiction in English: From Khushwant Singh to Amitav Ghosh (Amsterdam University Press: 2010); and a co-edited ICAS volume, Writing India Anew: Indian English Fiction 2000-2010 (Amsterdam University Press: 2013). I also taught at Leiden University College (LUC), The Hague; and at the Leiden University Institute of Area Studies (LIAS).
We relocated back home to Kolkata after a decade, in 2017. I started my second innings of teaching in the city at Presidency University, as Guest Faculty, followed by full-time positions at Sister Nivedita University (where I briefly headed a fledgling department) and then later at The Heritage College. All the while, being heavily invested in the Kolkata Partition Museum Project (KPMP), which I had initiated in 2016 and which began to formally function from 2018. Since late 2021, I have devoted my energies primarily to the latter.
