Rochona Majumdar is a historian of modern India. She is Professor and Chair of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, at the University of Chicago. She is a faculty associate in the Department of History and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Majumdar serves on the board of the Nicholson Center for British Studies and is a faculty fellow at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory.

Her writings span histories of gender, marriage, and family in modern India, postcolonial history and theory, and histories of Indian cinema. Her recent book, Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures (Columbia, 2021; Penguin Random House, 2021), makes a powerful case for considering “art films” as a new mode of apprehending postcolonial history. The book won the Chidananda Dasgupta Memorial Award for Best Writing on Cinema, was featured in the longlist of the Kraszna-Krausz award, and was chosen for the shortlist of the Modernist Studies Association. While noting the book’s “far-reaching implications for scholars in the fields of film studies, post-colonial studies, and modernist studies,” Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures was described by the MSA as “a meticulously researched account of art cinema’s function within a specific historical moment and national context” that showed how “art films themselves [are] a mode of historical apprehension.”  

---

---

Majumdar’s first book, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (Duke, 2009), is an innovative cultural history of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal that challenged the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Majumdar’s work is marked by the remarkable and unique archives she painstakingly assembles and reads with great insight to make important claims about the nature of Indian modernity and public culture.  The book was shortlisted by the International Convention of Asia Scholars (Social Sciences shortlist).

---

…in Bengal, people typically don’t dance in their weddings, and yet
now you have a standard model of what an Indian wedding is, and it looks very much like watching Bollywood.

New York Times, September 21 2023

---

Majumdar also writes extensively on postcolonial theory and history. Her 2010 Writing Postcolonial History is a useful guide to historians interested in understanding the impact of postcolonial theory on history-writing. She is the co-editor, with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Andrew Sartori, of From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (New Delhi: OUP, 2007) and, with Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordheim, Orit Bashkin et al., of Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe (Oxford: OUP, 2015).

Majumdar writes in Bangla for the Anandabazar Patrika and other Bengali outlets.