Ph.D. Student Arkamitra Ghatak

Arkamitra Ghatak is a Doctoral Student at the Department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia, South Asia Institute since October, 2019. She is also a fellow of the Graduate School of Transcultural Studies at the HCTS, University of Heidelberg. She completed her Bachelor’s Degree (2016) and Master’s Degree (2018) with a Major in History from Presidency University, Kolkata in India. Her publications include “From Matriarch to Divine Mother: Caste, Gender, and Deification in Hagiographies of Satīmā,” in Gendered Agency in Transcultural Hinduism and Buddhism, edited by Ute Hüsken, Agi Wittich, and Nanette R. Spina (Routledge, 2024); “The Bhagavadgita and the Gandhian Hermeneutic of non-Violence: Globalizing Selfless Action,” in The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought, edited by Milinda Banerjee and Julian Strube (CUP, 2024); “Bharatbhoomi Punyabhoomi: In Search of a Global Theosophical India in Tarakishore Choudhury’s Writings,” Global Histories Vol. 3, no. 1 (April, 2017). She has also been trained in facilitating Academic Writing from heiSKILLS Kompetenz und Sprachzentrum and serves as a Writing Coach for the Writers’ Club of the students at South Asia Institute (SAI) since 2024.

Her ongoing Doctoral Project is titled “The Female Guru as Jagadjananī: a Transcultural History of ‘Universal Motherhood’ in Twentieth Century South Asia.”  It is supervised by Prof. Dr. Ute Hüsken and Prof. Dr. Hans Harder. Research for the project was funded by the Graduate School Scholarship Programme (2019) of the DAAD from 2019 to 2023. Focusing on prominent female gurus from twentieth century South Asia, her project merges methodologies from transcultural intellectual history and global history of religion and interrogates why female gurus are celebrated as ‘universal mothers’ by their followers. It demonstrates how these female gurus, who acquired spiritual authority as human goddesses in the male-dominated field of Hindu guruhood, were perceived as messianic agents of national regeneration and world-making in their transcultural devotee circles. The project critically situates these devotee narratives in the context of overlapping discourses on motherhood, pacifism, the ‘mystic East’, and India as a spiritual landscape that dominated the ideological milieu of late colonial India and the inter-war and post World-War world.