Dr Somak Biswas

I work on modern and contemporary Britain, India and global history. My current project looks at how race, migration and sexuality coincided during the AIDS epidemic in Britain. In particular, I look at how forms of African and Asian mobility became key to racialised border practices, while also producing new forms of Black and Asian organising in Britain. 

My first book Passages through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia (Cambridge Uni. Pres, 2023) examines the phenomenon of western Indophilia, defined as romanticised engagements around idealised, Hindu forms of India. It offers a critical account of the nature of intimacies cultivated between key Indian guru figures (Vivekananda, Gandhi, Tagore) and their western disciples. Ashrams and letters became key to producing Indophile enchantments and sutained investment in major cultural and nationalist projects. Focusing on two such projects - the abolition of indentured labour and the dissemination of Vedantic Hinduism – I argue that Indophile deployments came to represent and naturalise high caste Hindu claims to culture and respectability, reproducing deep hierarchies of caste, class, race and gender. Drawing on English, Hindi, Bengali and French sources, the book unifies distinct strands of western discipleship within a shared tradition of Indophilia, and probes their profound consequences, both in India and abroad.

 Passages through India has been awarded the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Prize for 2024.