Rimi B. Chatterjee
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Rimi B. Chatterjee is an author based in Kolkata (earlier Calcutta), India. She was born in Belfast in 1969, grew up in England, and later came to live in India. She studied at Jadavpur University, Kolkata and at Oxford University, where she did a D.Phil. in the area of book history titled 'A History of the Trade to South Asia of Macmillan and Company and Oxford University Press, 1875 -1900'.
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[edit] Biography
Rimi B. Chatterjee got her D.Phil in 1997 and returned to India. She began working in 1998 as an editor with Bhatkal and Sen, a small publishing house which produces scholarly titles in English and Bengali in the social sciences and in gender studies under the imprints 'Samya' and 'Stree'. There she oversaw authors like Kancha Ilaiah, Bani Basu and Gail Omvedt. She contributed to the process of translating into English, several important works by women such as Sulekha Sanyal's Nabankur (The Seedling), Manikuntala Sen's Shediner Kotha (In Search of Freedom) and Jyotirmoyee Devi's The Impermanence of Lies. She also published a translation of a novella by Mahasweta Devi for Seagull Books, Kolkata.
She began her career as an academic at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 2000, then moved to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where she was a fellow from 2003 to 2004. Much of the writing of her history of Oxford University Press was done there. She also published a translation of Abanindranath Tagore's autobigraphy Apon Katha (as Apon Katha: My Story) in 2004. The following year her novel Signal Red appeared. She now teaches at Jadavpur University.
[edit] Books
[edit] Histories
While in the UK she gathered material from various archives on the histories of Macmillan and Oxford University Press and their relationship with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma covering the period up to 1947. The data on Oxford University Press is mostly hitherto unpublished archival material from confidential records generated by the Press. Her book Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India During the Raj is the first in-depth account of a large-scale European publisher interacting with Indian markets and authors, and raises several significant questions about the nature of the colonial encounter in India though the medium of print, particularly in the later stages of British Rule.[1] For instance, in the case of Oxford University Press, its status as an academic press that had supported several key Indological publishing ventures in the mid-nineteenth century gave it a cachet in the eyes of Indians that other presses could not have, and it was seen as pro-India as a result. At the same time its self-imposed custodianship of Indological study was questioned, not just by nationalist groups but also by many of its own authors. Furthermore, Oxford University Press often tried to tone down the imperialism of key authors such as Vincent Smith. These findings go against more 'hegemonic' readings of Indian encounters with print, by scholars such as Gauri Vishwanathan[2].
A second history, tracing the very different interactions of Macmillan and Company with Indian cultures of print, is on the way.[3] This is based likewise on unpublished material from the Macmillan archives and will deal with the genesis and reception of iconic series such as Pyari Charan Sarkar's Books of Reading, which helped teach a whole generation of Bengalis how to read English.
[edit] Creative Projects
Signal Red is a science fiction novel set in the near future in a world where totalitarian politics has gained control of India. It is about an Indian defence scientist who gradually discovers that his work is being used to develop highly unethical weapons, and what happens to him when he starts to question his bosses and go against the rules. The City of Love is set against the spice trade in sixteenth century India ten years after Vasco da Gama's landfall at Calicut in 1498, and has for its characters pirates, Sufis, Tantriks and Vaishnavs.
[edit] Bibliography
- The City of Love (fiction) (New Delhi: Penguin, forthcoming in 2007)
- Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India During the Raj (publishing history) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006) ISBN 0-19-567474-X
- Signal Red: A Novel (fiction) (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005) ISBN 0-14-303262-3
- Apon Katha: My Story by Abanindranath Tagore (translation from Bengali to English) (Chennai: Tara, 2004)
- Titu Mir by Mahasweta Devi (Bhattacharya) (translation from Bengali to English) (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000) ISBN 81-7046-174-X
[edit] Notes
- ^ Rimi B. Chatterjee, Empire of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India During the Raj, (New Delhi: OUP, 2006)
- ^ Gauri Vishwanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)
- ^ Expansion and rewriting of part of unpublished thesis, 'A History of the Trade to South Asia by Macmillan and Co. and Oxford University Press, 1875-1900', doctoral diss., University of Oxford, 1997.
