New Delhi: Nandini Das, 49, is a British-Indian creator, historian, and educational. She is a Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture on the University of Oxford, and her analysis focuses on the cultural and mental exchanges between India and Europe within the early trendy period. Das’s debut guide, Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023), gained the 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. It is a groundbreaking account of the primary English diplomatic mission to Mughal India, led by Sir Thomas Roe within the early seventeenth century.
Das attracts on a variety of sources, together with Indian and British eyewitness accounts, to inform the story of this complicated and infrequently fraught encounter. She reveals how the English and Mughal ambassadors struggled to grasp one another’s cultures and political techniques, but in addition how they discovered methods to cooperate and construct relationships.
Courting India has been praised for its originality, its meticulous scholarship, and its partaking writing model. Das’s work is necessary as a result of it challenges the standard view of the British Empire as a one-way road, with the British imposing their tradition and values on the colonized peoples. She reveals that the connection between Britain and India was rather more complicated and nuanced, and that there was a substantial amount of cultural change and mutual studying.
Early Life And Education
Nandini Das was born and raised in India. She studied English literature on the University of Delhi, after which went on to earn a PhD in English from the University of Cambridge. After her PhD, Das taught on the University of Warwick earlier than transferring to the University of Oxford in 2011.
Research Interests
Das’s analysis pursuits deal with the cultural and mental exchanges between India and Europe within the early trendy period. She is especially within the methods by which the English and Mughal empires interacted with one another, and the way these interactions formed the event of each empires.
Public Engagement
In addition to her educational work, Das can also be a passionate advocate for public engagement with historical past. She has written for quite a lot of well-liked publications, together with the BBC and The Guardian. She can also be an everyday speaker at public occasions, the place she talks about her analysis and her ardour for historical past.
Conclusion
Nandini Das is a scholar-writer who bridges cultures in a novel and necessary method. Her work helps us to grasp the complicated and infrequently fraught relationship between Britain and India, and it challenges us to consider the legacy of colonialism in new methods.
