Research Interests

I am researching circus in the context of colonial India focusing on the intimate space in the interstices of performative and textual mobility that circus provides as a repository of embodied and affective meanings. Circus in conjunction with other forms of physical culture presents a distinct critical ground of research into the shared territories of Literary studies with Performance Studies. While circus’s performative visuality evades strict codes of theoretical and conceptual categories, writings on circus and its associated physical cultures gained an increased circulation since 1850s. The moving and malleable bodies thus stretched and contorted not just in the arena but also beyond it, into texts through memoirs, travel books, newspaper reports, historical accounts, biographies, narrative accounts of circus enthusiasts and fictions. The mode of circulation of physical culture not only in practices but also in the imaginative and fictional currency of these literary sources becomes a necessary engagement.

As part of my research, a survey and field work through documenting circus performance and the biography of performers, along with interviews of members of the various ‘akhras’ or centres of physical training is of prime importance. A range of newspaper and visual archives on circus also provide an interesting outlook into how data pertaining to performance is documented and my thesis would like to look for gaps in how archives and collections move between the constraints of remembering and accidental reminiscences. Drawing on a range of sources from legal documents, quasi-histories, pamphlets, fiction and travel writings, along with archival and ethnographic records, my thesis would like to argue that it is the ‘liveness’ of the circus, not as a phenomenal concept alone, but as a distinct ontology of performativity of myriad bodies in motion that both inspires and resists textualization of embodied knowledge.

Prodosh’s research is supervised by Dr. Silvija Jestrovic(Professor, Theatre and Performance Studies) and Dr. Jim Davies( Professor, Theatre and Performance Studies)

Publications

Journals

‘The Road to Xanadu after 200 years: A Measure of the ‘Pleasure Dome’’. Middle Flight, Volume. 5, Number. 1, 2016 a special volume on “The Wonderful Year 1816- A Bicentenary appraisal. pp 7-12. ISSN 2319-7684.

‘Rumour as performance: Reviewing Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow and the ontology of Postcolonialism.’ Middle Flight, Volume. 6, Number. 1, 2017 a special volume on “ Peripheral Identities in Literature, Film and Performance”. pp 158-167. ISSN 2319-7684.

Book Chapters

‘ Caliban begets Caliban: Blackness as Racial Performativity in Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest.’ in Shakespeare In Focus: In Commemoration of the Quartercentenary of Shakespeare’s Death(Revised Edition), eds. Debdas Roy and Pritha Kundu, Kolkata: Rohini Nandan, 2017. pp 92-101. ISBN 978-81-934281-8-4.

‘Walking on a Tightrope: Circus and its Double in Colonial Bengal’. Ecological Entanglements: Affect, Embodiment and Ethics of Care, ed. Arka Chattopadhyay, Ambika Aiyadurai and Nishaant Choksi. Orient Blackswan.( Forthcoming in 2022)

Seminars and Conference Papers 

• 02.2016: ‘Rumour as performance: Reviewing Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow and the ontology of Postcolonialism.’ -International Conference on New Directions in Postcolonial Studies organised by the Department of English, Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, WB, India

• 03.2020: ‘Walking on a Tightrope: Circus and its Double in Colonial Bengal’ International Conference on Affect, Ecology, and Embodiment, IIT Gandhinagar, Gujrat, India
• August 8, 2020: 'Bearing Witness: From the visceral to the public dimensions of memorializing' in a panel on Theatre, Space and Practice organized by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IISER Bhopal, India
• June 20, 2022. 'The visceral aesthetics and politics of "skill" in circus practices and physical culture in Colonial Bengal' at the Popular Entertainment Working Group, IFTR 2022 conference on 'Shifting Centres' at Reykjavik, Iceland.
• September 13, 2022. 'Colonial masculinity and its' visceral slips: (Un)marking the presence of women performers in circus and its' allied physical culture in colonial Bengal. Bodies and Performance Working Group panel on Gendered traces, erasure and agency in the Archive at TaPra 2022.

Other Roles and activities

Organized a Postgraduate Research symposium at the Theatre and Performance Studies department on October 5, 2022 (alongwith Varvara Sklez and Yangzi Zhou).

Wednesday- 14:00- 16:00

(Also on Teams)