Author: Sekhar Bandyopadhyay

Sita Venkateswar is a socio-cultural anthropologist in the School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University and Associate Director, Massey chapter, New Zealand India Research Institute, New Zealand. Her research documents the ways academic practices can be responsive to social inequities and she incorporates critical feminist scholar-activist research methodologies, designated as Public Anthropology, informed by feminist and postcolonial theories. She uses a comparative and reflexive anthropological lens to address issues of internal colonialism, gender, poverty, social oppression and structural violence within the postcolonial and neoliberal contexts of South Asia. Her ethnography Development and Ethnocide: Colonial Practices in the Andaman Islands (2004) is based on her Ph D fieldwork in the Andaman Islands from 1989 to 1992 funded by the National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant. Her co-edited book, The Politics of Indigeneity: Dialogues and Reflections on Indigenous Activism (2011) published by Zed Books. Her current research explores multi-species approaches to food resilience that focuses on millet cultivation in India. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Director, New Zealand India Research Institute, School of History, Philosophy, Political Science & International Relation, New Zealand. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Director of the New Zealand India Research Institute and Professor of Asian History at Victoria University of Wellington. His academic specialisation is in social and political history of colonial and postcolonial India. He has also written on the Indian diaspora and India-New Zealand relations in historical times. He has published seven books, eight edited or co-edited books, and more than fifty book chapters and journal articles. In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. In 2014, for his book Decolonization in South Asia: Meanings of Freedom in Post-independence West Bengal, 1947-52, he was awarded the Rabindra Smriti Puraskar by the Bangla Academy, Government of West Bengal.