Dr Somak Biswas

I work on modern Britain, South Asia 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 ethnic minority 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 nuanced account of the nature of intimacies cultivated between key Indian guru figures (Vivekananda, Gandhi, Tagore) and their western disciples. It shows that ashrams and letters became intimate sites to produce and sustain Indophile enchantments. Such enchantments inspired Indophile investments in major Indian cultural and nationalist projects. Focusing on two such projects - the abolition of indentured labour and the dissemination of Vedantic Hinduism – I argue how Indophile deployments came to represent and naturalise high caste Hindu claims to culture and respectability, reproducing in the process deep hierarchies of caste, class, race and gender. Drawing on new material in English, Hindi, Bengali and French, the book unifies distinct strands of western discipleship within a shared tradition of Indophilia, and explores their profound consequences, both in India and abroad.