The Scholar

Chapter 1

Niladri R. Chatterjee (1967 – ) is a Professor, Department of English, University of Kalyani, West Bengal. His doctoral work was on the novelist Christopher Isherwood.

A recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship (for which he went to the University of Texas at Austin) and the British Council-Charles Wallace Fellowship (University of Cambridge), he co-edited The Muffled Heart: Stories of the Disempowered Male (2005), and Naribhav: Androgyny and Female Impersonation in India (2016).

The Muffled Heart: Stories of the Disempowered Male Naribhav: Androgyny and Female Impersonation in India Prof. Chatterjee has been contributing to international publications since 1995. He has been teaching a course in gender studies at his university since 2009 and runs a f*******: group called New Gender Studies. Since March 2020, he has also been posting videos on his YouTube channel.

New Gender StudiesProf. Chatterjee’s idea of a good time is to listen to Samuel Barber or Federico Mompou and sip Earl Grey as it rains outside. He cannot decide whether he is more passionate about Kolkata or feminism since both occupy a large part of his heart and mind. He can often be found drenched in sweat, running around the city with his DSLR, photographing the ruins of beautiful but abandoned buildings.

Although in a relationship for the last nine years, he has recently come out as polyamorous and believes that it is miserly to love just one person at a time. His aesthetic orientation is unashamedly postmodernist and loves ‘bad art’ because of the sincerity it often has that is missing in ‘high art.’ He tries to give his heart a slight advantage over his head in his academic and personal life.