Sekhar Bandyopadhyay | |
---|---|
শেখর বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায় | |
Born | Chunchura, West Bengal, India | 7 July 1952
Awards | Rabindra Puraskar Rabindranath Tagore Memorial Prize |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Presidency College University of Calcutta |
Academic work | |
Discipline | History |
Sub-discipline | Caste system in India, Bengal, nationalism, postcolonialism, Indian diaspora |
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (born 7 July 1952) is an Indian historian and a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. Bandyopadhyay is known for his research on the Dalit caste of Bengal.[1]
Bandyopadhyay was born to Nanigopal Bandyopadhyay,[2] a professor of Bengali[3] and Pratima Bandyopadhyay. Bandyopadhyay earned his B.A. degree in History at Presidency College and an M.A. degree at the University of Calcutta. He was awarded a doctorate at the University of Calcutta.[4] He is married to Srilekha Bandyopadhyay and lives in Wellington with his wife.
Bandyopadhyay is Emeritus Professor at Victoria University of Wellington and was the founding director of the New Zealand India Research Institute.[5] He has also taught at the Ramakrishna Mission Residential College, Narendrapur, University of Kalyani, and the University of Calcutta.[6] Bandyopadhyay was the first recipient of the Charles Wallace Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for South Asian Studies, SOAS University of London.[7] He has also held visiting fellowships at the University of Chicago, National University of Singapore, International Institute for Asian Studies, Curtin University, Australian National University and Rabindra Bharati University.[8] From 2009 to 2010, Bandyopadhyay served as the President of the New Zealand Asian Studies Society[9] and currently co-edits its journal, the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies.[10] In 2009, Bandyopadhyay was awarded the Rabindra Smriti Puraskar (Rabindranath Tagore Memorial Prize), given by the Government of West Bengal, for his monograph Decolonisation in South Asia: Meanings of Freedom in Post-Independence Bengal 1947-52.[11] Bandyopadhyay has been a recipient of a Marsden grant of the Royal Society of New Zealand.[12]
Since 2021, the Sekhar Bandyopadhyay Prize has been awarded annually by the Department of History at Victoria University of Wellington to the student submitting the best essay or thesis on an aspect of Indian history or the history of colonialism or nationalism.[13][14] The award 'acknowledges and celebrates the distinguished career of Professor Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Professor of History at Victoria University of Wellington'.[15]