As part of our researcher spotlight series, we highlight individual researchers and their work in more detail.
Our current Featured Researcher is: Adrija Ghosh
The title of her thesis is: Psychogeography, the Poetics of Jibanananda Das, & the Postcolonial Witness
HEI: University of St Andrews
Supervisors: Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri & Dr Peter Mackay
Below, Adrija gives a synopsis of her thesis and reflects on her research, her experiences as a doctoral researcher, and the lessons she has learned during this time.
About Adrija’s Research:
My creative-critical thesis reads the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) as a precursor to a psychogeographic, postcolonial lyric witness. I argue that his wanderings through Calcutta belong to a lineage that runs from Baudelaire’s Paris to Eliot’s London, and on to the postcolonial flânerie of the Bombay poets and the Bengali Hungryalists. The thesis makes its intervention through two intertwined threads, i.e., new English translations of Das’s poems from the Bengali, and ten original poems written in response to the critical research. It draws on three connected frameworks: psychogeography, postcolonial studies and the poetry of witness. Methodologically, I work with an experimental “feedback-loop” model of composition, in which the translations, the original poems and the critical analysis are written concurrently, each shaping the others. Translating Das changes how I read him, and my readings in turn change how I translate.
What sparked your interest in this subject?
As someone, who had left a small (home)town for bigger cities, first in pursuit of an education and later of employment, I recognise Das, who had left Barisal for Calcutta. I know the wonder, the estrangement and the sensory overload of a city that does not know your name. Das was where I first met Calcutta, seen through an outsider’s eyes, and the image stayed with me. I was trying to map my own literary genealogy; reading Das alongside the Bombay poets and the Hungryalists made me think whether what I am currently writing belongs to a similar strand. It also helps that Das is one of my favourite poets. I love the provocation of his verse, and how he sets one image against another until the space between them begins to blur, erode and collapse.
What’s the most surprising thing your research has taught you about your subject?
Translation has shown me how I can stretch the limits of language; how it is an act of invention and deconstruction, and how it is inescapably political. Finding a synthesis between craft, critical theory, and close reading has been an adventure, and I hope it is making me a better thinker and a stronger scholar. I am also struck by how easily Das moves between the English and European canons, Bengali and regional traditions, the vast mythic reservoirs of India, as well as the rest of the world, while evoking the universal. As a comparatist, I quite enjoy his range.
What’s the most surprising thing your research has taught you about yourself?
I did not anticipate enjoying being the poet, the translator, and the critic all at once; but often a close reading sends me back to a draft, and a translation choice opens a line of argument. Unexpectedly, this means I have become more flexible, and I now welcome revision rather than resist it. Also, teaching myself to write different kinds of sonnets has been a particular pleasure, and a form I once approached cautiously now feels like a playground!
If you were your own supervisor what advice would you give yourself?
Trust the feedback loop. The translations, poems and critical analyses will keep unlocking one another. Be patient with drafts and uncertainty, and remember that a thesis grows through revision as much as through reading.
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