Dr Somak Biswas

I am a historian of modern Britain and South Asia. I work on the intersections of race, sexuality and migration. My current project examines how AIDS produced new anxieties around the control of Black and Asian mobilities in late twentieth century Britain while birthing new forms of sexual health activism.
Before coming to Cambridge, I was Past and Present Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London. I did my MA and MPhil degrees at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, and my PhD at the University of Warwick, UK.
I convene the MPhil module 'Race and Empire in Modern British History' with Dr Chika Tonooka, and run the Labour History Cluster with colleagues in the History Faculty. I also lecture on the Part IA papers O7, O9 and O11.
My first book Passages through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia (Cambridge Uni. Press, 2023) examines the phenomenon of western Indophilia, romanticised engagements around idealised, Hindu forms of India. It offers a critical account of the intimacies cultivated between major Indian guru figures (Vivekananda, Gandhi, Tagore) and their key western disciples (e.g. CF Andrews, Mira Behn, Sara Bull). I argue that ashrams and letters offered intimate sites of self making that produced the very form and fantasy of Indophilia, sustaining disciples' 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 show how Indophile deployments came to represent and naturalise high caste Hindu claims to culture and respectability, a process that reproduced deep hierarchies of caste, class, race and gender. Passages unifies distinct strands of western discipleship within a shared tradition of Indophilia, and probes their profound consequences, both in India and abroad.
Contact
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Office: Room 5.29, Faculty of History, West Road, Cambridge
Book:
Passages through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890–1940, Cambridge University Press, July 2023 (awarded the 2024 Gladstone Prize by the Royal Historical Society)
Book Chapter:
Somak Biswas, 'Languages of longing: Indian gurus, Western disciples and practices of letter-writing', Gurus and Media: Sound, image, machine, text and the digital, UCL Press, Sep 2023.
Journals:
Somak Biswas, “HIV-AIDS and the NAZ Project: Race, Sexuality and South Asian AIDS Activism in Britain, 1990-2000”, Journal for the History of Sexuality (forthcoming, 2025)
Somak Biswas, Churnjeet Mahn and Rohit Dasgupta, ‘Queer Politics in Times of New Authoritarianism’, South Asian Popular Culture, August 2023 (Forthcoming as Routledge edited volume).
“Approaching Migration in World History: How to Use Primary Sources” in Research Methods Primary Sources (Adam Matthew Digital, 2021). Web.