Ranjamrittika Bhowmik is a scholar of culture and language, an aspiring yoginī, whose research interests are located at an intersection between literary studies, philosophy, anthropology, postcolonial studies, History of Religions and marginalized traditions. Her doctoral research at the University of Oxford focuses on a study of the Rājbaṃśī community in north-eastern India and their oral literature composed in the Rājbaṃśī lect, a living tradition largely unexplored by the academic community in India and beyond. Her research performs a diachronic study of esoteric yoga traditions in north-eastern India, through a common lineage of Buddhism and Hinduism. Her work explores mysticism and language, politics of alternative social imaginaries through religious movements, notions of the subtle body, foregrounding pluralist literature of dissent and its artistic and political implications through performance. In her doctoral work, she analyses language and practice, combining literary criticism with anthropological research. She is currently working on conserving, archiving, documenting and spreading awareness about intangible cultural heritage and oral traditions of highly marginalised rural artists of indigenous communities in Eastern India. Her project has been supported by the University of Oxford, the Oxford Centre of Hindu Studies, Zeno Karl Foundation Switzerland, the Birla Sanskriti Trust, and by the Tata Education and Development Trust. Ranjamrittika has studied and carried out academic research in institutions such as Jadavpur University in Kolkata, University of Milan in Italy, University of Lausanne in Switzerland, University of Oxford and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Her post-doctoral research explores the field of History of Emotions and ideas of individual value production through a museum audience, historical distancing and neutrality vs. empathy, tools of direct emotional engagement, ideas of memory, how the digital mediates/interferes with emotional experience, biography of objects and decolonization, and intersectionality. Her research aims to map the emotional journey of a visitor in a museum space (for e.g. from their socio-cultural and psychological point of view).
Publications
Ranjamrittika Bhowmik, Debra Castillo, “Heading East: Spanish-Bangla Collisions in El próximo oriente”, in Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, Intellect Book Journals 15, no. 1 (2018) 3–24,
https://doi.org/10.1386/slac.1...
Ranjamrittika Bhowmik, “Tagore vädjade till en universell humanism/Tagore appealed to a universal humanism,” Liberal Debatt, 22 October 2020, https://www.liberaldebatt.se/2...
Ranjamrittika Bhowmik, “Comparative Literature and Digital Humanities” in E-Qual News, Bi-Monthly Newsletter of the Eu-India Project E-Qual 2, no. 4, (Kolkata, 2015), 21–25.