Papiya Ghosh - Work

Work

After her PhD, Papiya Ghosh taught History at Daulat Ram College (Delhi University) briefly, and then at the Hindu College, University of Delhi for two years. In 1979, she moved back to Patna, where she taught at her alma mater, Patna Women's College (Patna University), until 1991. She was subsequently promoted and moved to the Department of History, Patna University.

Her research subjects related, inter-alia, to the impact of Partition in 1947, the plight of Dalit Muslims, peoples’ movements, popular syncretic culture, secularism, the contribution of the underprivileged to political processes etc. She was particularly interested in questions of identity, especially how people identify themselves individually and collectively when removed from their place of origin. She spent much of her time travelling to remote areas, meeting key sources (within and outside the country), and conducting first-hand primary research using her own limited resources. She would devote hours on translation, roping in friends and well-wishers to help. She taught herself to read and write Urdu, as many of the manuscripts she studied were written in the Nastaliq script. She immersed herself in local traditions (many obscure, some dying out) and was also a keen student of diasporic sub-continental populations, both contemporary (such as the Bangladeshi population in London) and historical (such as in Mauritius and the West Indies).

She was:

• Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Chicago, 1994;
• Rockefeller Fellow at the Triangle South Asia Consortium at North Carolina State University, 1996–97;
• Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (India), 1993–96
• Visiting Scholar at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti Bhavan, New Delhi, 1988–91;
• Adviser to the Asian Development Research Institute, Patna; and
• Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.