Prof. Sugata Bose

Sugata Bose is the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University. Bose has served as Director of Graduate Studies in History at Harvard and as the Founding Director of Harvard's South Asia Institute. Prior to taking up the Gardiner Chair at Harvard University in 2001, Bose was a Fellow of St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge, and Professor of History and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Bose was educated at St. Xavier's School and Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Cambridge where he obtained his Ph.D. His scholarship has contributed to a deeper understanding of colonial and post-colonial political economy, the relation between rural and urban domains, inter-regional arenas of travel, trade and imagination across the Indian Ocean, and Indian ethical discourses, political philosophy and economic thought. His books include Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics (1986), South Asia and World Capitalism (1990), Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital in The New Cambridge History of India series (1993), Credit, Markets and the Agrarian Economy of Colonial India (1994), Nationalism, Democracy and Development (1997, with Ayesha Jalal) and Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (1998, 2004, 2011) with Ayesha Jalal) In his much-acclaimed work, A Hundred Horizons: the Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2006) Bose crosses area studies and disciplinary frontiers and bridges the domains of political economy and culture. Amartya Sen describes A Hundred Horizons as "an excellent historical study, full of contemporary relevance for understanding an important ancestry of present-day globalization". He is the author of numerous scholarly articles on modern economic, social and political history. He has jointly edited with Kris Manjapra a collection of essays in transnational history titled Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Idea (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). He is the author of the definitive biography His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard University Press and New Delhi: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2011). He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and gave the G.M. Trevelyan Lecture at the University of Cambridge. In 2015 he has been awarded the Rabindra Puraskar, the highest literary award of West Bengal, for his corpus of works with a special mention of his book His Majesty's Opponent.

Bose is joint editor with Sisir Kumar Bose of the twelve-volume Collected Works of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and joint editor with Krishna Bose of Purabi: the East in its Feminine Gender (2007), a book of translations by Charu C. Chowdhuri of Rabindranath Tagore's poems and songs. He has translated into English and published recordings in a four-CD set of all the songs of Rabindranath Tagore composed on the poet's overseas voyages under the title Visvayatri Rabindranath (with Pramita Mallick singing the Bengali originals) as well music CDs of his own, including Amaar Rabindranath or My Tagore (Calcutta: Bhavna Records, 2010). He has made three documentary films on modern South Asian history and politics that have been broadcast on public television in the USA and India. He has delivered numerous major named lectures in North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australasia.

Sugata Bose is currently a Member of Parliament in India elected to the 16th Lok Sabha from the Jadavpur constituency in West Bengal and a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs.