Doctoral Candidate Madhubanti Chanda
Contact: madhubanti.chanda@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de
Madhubanti Chanda’s journey in academia began with an honours degree in History from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University (2012–15). During this period, she discovered her interest in Art History and pursued a Master’s degree in the subject from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda (2016–18). Madhubanti’s Master’s thesis examined how the performance practices (in terms of their somatics and philosophy) developed by the Devdasis/Maharis played a key role in shaping the most iconic temple architecture of medieval Odisha, such as the Lingaraja temple. Until then, scholars had primarily focused on divine kingship and the expanding temple economy as the driving forces behind these architectural transformations.
Madhubanti’s academic focus expanded during her MPhil in Social Sciences at CSSS, Calcutta (2019–21). The interdisciplinary nature of the program led her to explore questions of text, script, and literary culture. It was during this time that Madhubanti began working on her current project on the Sileti Nagari script under the guidance of Dr. Rajarshi Ghose.
In 2019, Madhubanti Chanda was invited to present a paper at the University of Pennsylvania for the conference “Vernacular and Cosmopolitan in South Asian Islam”, supported by the university’s South Asia Center, Department of Religious Studies, and Global Islamic Studies group. Her paper analyzed the combined phenomenon of Bengali manuscript patronage and the Chala style of architecture in the courts of the Manipuri, Jaintia, and Cachari kingdoms (1660–1780), which first appeared in the Sultanate mosques of Bengal. The study sought to demonstrate how architectural and textual patronage, aimed at upholding a Brahmanical order in these hilly kingdoms, followed broader patterns of cultural patronage that originated during the Hussain Shahi Sultanate in Bengal.
Beyond academia, Madhubanti Chanda is deeply passionate about dance. She has trained in Bharatanatyam for over 26 years under Guru Monica Chanda and Padma Bhushan Guru Saroja Vaidyanathan. After completing her PhD, Madhubanti hopes to return to full-fledged performance and create experimental works on stage, drawing inspiration from the texts she has encountered in her research.
Doctoral Research
Project Title: Studying the Print and Literary Cultureb of the Sileti Nagri Script in Sylhet (1880-1956): Script, Space, Public
Summary: Madhubanti Chanda’s doctoral thesis is a study of the Sileti Nagari script, its literary and print culture as it unfolded between 1880 and 1966 around the vicinities of colonial Sylhet. Moving away from questions of its origins, Madhubanti aims to study the texts written in the Sileti Nagari script by examining how the script formed its own reading public while fostering Sylhet and its neighbouring hills and plains as a Muslim Qasba, within the context of a diverse population. Studying the history of the script from these vantage points helps to understand the Sileti Nagari texts as highly relational, shaped by the broader cultural ecology in which Bengali, Arabic, Urdu, and English texts also circulated. In doing so, Sylhet is further revealed as a diffused, highly connected site without clear boundaries, despite colonial interventions that sought to frame it as a frontier to the ‘Northeastern’ hills.