Biography

Dr. Bikash Sarma is Assistant Professor at Jindal School of International Affairs. Prior to this, he has taught at Salesian College, University of North Bengal, and has assisted teaching at Sikkim Central University. He holds a PhD from the Center for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Bikash’s work traces a particular mode of legibility of a terra incognita at the ‘North East Frontier’ by interrogating the intersection of environmental determinism, pathology and cartography in Colonial Assam. He looks at the genealogy of colonial cross-regional categories like the tropics, waste, indolence, epidemiology, and the waterscape of the river islands (chars) of Brahmaputra. He has published articles on the liminality of the chars, and how the representation of geography, climate and the native bodies since the middle of nineteenth century still reverberates in contemporary knowledge production about the North East region. His forthcoming article examines the production of a pathological space enacted by medical topographies and kala azar anxiety in nineteenth and twentieth century India and Britain.

Bikash’s interest lies broadly in the field of Northeast Studies wherein he works on the thematics of political geography; modern history of the region; history of ideas; colonial forms of knowledge production (climatology, medicine, and cartography); disease-thinking and geographical thought in nineteenth and twentieth century India; border and borderlanders; migration and critical security.

At JSIA, he offers a core course on State Formations, and an elective course that maps the Politics and History of India’s Northeast.