Malya b

Academic, Writer, Creative Artist

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  • On Academic Writing, or not writing Academically

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    Red no-entry traffic sign on a pole at street corner

    Recently, I participated in a workshop organised by The Feminist Review Collective, where we started the discussion by creating a wordcloud of words that, we are told, are not academic.

    Overwhelmingly then, the cloud grew with words of affect – ‘joy’ ‘I feel’, ‘sentimental’, ‘softness’, ‘I reckon’ – these were some of the words I remember of what we are told are not academic.

    How to write academically

    And I thought later, who was it that first told me that this was not the way to write academically? But I couldn’t really put my finger on a person. I suppose it happened organically because of the work I was reading, even when I was a young undergraduate, trying to learn how to do academics.

    But there was a duality – because I was studying English literature in Jadavpur University, where our professors frequently told us to smash the discipline. In one of our assessments on graphic novels, the professor had set a question consisting merely of three words – ‘I’ve been framed!’

    Yet another professor, one day, when their union was striking, turned up in the morning with two of her dogs and swept us out of the classroom and into the university lawns. There we sat in a circle smoking and reading poetry while she told us elaborately about how shit some of it was.

    So that could not have been where my ‘training’ in academic writing came from. Maybe it was because, after I’d listened to these radical professors, I’d turn to the libraries or the internet to study before a test. In those pages of dense academic theory, the language was so monolithic, saying different things, perhaps a beautiful, almost revolutionary argument, in some cruel language.

    This article argues that …

    I hate that phrase, ‘argues that’, why so defensive?

    Even in my radical university, nobody really taught us how to do academic writing. We were left on our own to figure that part out. And reading the literature, academic literature, that has come out over the past hundred years or so, can be very damaging to the way you communicate.

    Writing for Readability

    Over the past few years, I’ve tried to unlearn the way academic treatise has been written. I’ve argued about writing creatively, in accessible language and most importantly to focus on readability.

    This has a political significance: if academics write in a language that is not accessible to the communities they are writing about, it reproduces colonial cycles where knowledge is produced in one place, that is, the academy, and the rest of the world, usually marginalised communities or the global South, becomes an endless producer of data.

    As academics then, I think it becomes almost an ethical obligation to return knowledge to the places we derive our knowledge/data from. One way to do that is to make your research accessible to as many people as possible.

    My source of all knowledge is reading

    So what does all this have to do with my initial point about the harshness of academic language?

    To live off an archetype, I am going to return to my mother. My mother is amazing – when I was a child, she would tell me things about remote islands in the Pacific to how Satyajit Ray shot his first films, about the possibilities of alien life and as she was a teacher, the latest pedagogic developments. And, she would say to me, ‘My source of all knowledge is reading’.

    What was she reading? I have seen her read off the bits of newspaper that street-vendors folded up to sell fried snacks. In short, everything!

    But she never went near an ‘academic’ publication – Baba re! I don’t understand a word, she would say. And I would try to imagine this Lady of letters baffled at a collection of exactly her forte – words! How come?

    Wishful Thinking

    What if the most critical knowledge that is produced in the academy is made readable, or accessible in any other way?

    Imagine the possibilities – combatting the nonsense that is spewed as ‘news’, people able to tell propaganda from fact, and maybe even… gaining nuanced understanding of political issues?

    Surely, it would benefit the whole world?

    What is Academic?

    Even a few centuries ago, knowledge was coded. In Europe it was Latin, in India it was Sanskrit or Persian.

    My conspiracy theory is that once the movements to replace these languages so far away from the people kicked it, and the vernacular came in, they (I don’t quite know WHO), found other means to stop knowledge from being completely democratised.

    Enter: The Academy.

    Your Institution does not have subscription to this journal.

    Individual subscription? £80 a month.

    Maybe, you get in. And it’s still a completely different language to the one(s) you speak. I call the language ‘harsh’ – others call is ‘jargon’, ‘critical’, ‘advanced’, or ‘academic’.

  • Why the Humanities are indispensable for Open Research

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    Conversations about Open Research are dominated by technical jargon around copyright, licensing and different paths to publishing open access. If you do a quick search, you are bound to hear quite flat sounding terms like ‘institutional rights repository’, ‘diamond access’ or maybe the slightly more bombastic – ‘Transformative Agreements’. I started a new job as an ‘Open Research’ Officer in a university in the northeast of England at the end of last year. Needless to say, as a historian and one that dwells largely in the world of literature, I had almost never found myself at a position to learn any of those terms. Quite irresponsibly, I suppose, (and I was lucky to have funding), I published both of my articles fully Open Access, without understanding the logistics behind it.

    As I wrote earlier, knowledge about Open Research seems to be immersed in factual statements about what the six types of Creative Commons Licenses are, for example, or the three routes to Open Access Publishing. Without denying the importance of learning the jargon, I want to talk about something else here.

    Humanities and Open Research

    Have the Humanities nothing to gain from Open Research? There are some things to understand about disciplinary disparities here. Whereas for STEM, journal articles are considered the primary modes of research dissemination, in the humanities, it is usually the book, or the monograph as it’s called. The production of a book (and costs associated with it) is far more complex than an article. Perhaps that has something to do with the lack of open research engagement in the humanities.

    But, I remember, when I was preparing for my interview for my current job, I very quickly made connections between the work I was already doing in archival ethics, decolonisation and gender studies with Open Research. You see, open research is about making knowledge freely accessible so that anybody with an internet connection can access research being produced in any part of the world. Most importantly, it is about removing paywalls. But removing paywalls doesn’t really disappear the costs associated with publishing, rather, it transfers the costs from the reader to the writer. I’ll come to that a little later. For now I want to start by saying that of course, for academics working to understand structural inequalities to knowledge production and dissemination, the principles of open research become immediately relevant.

    I want to argue that to understand the structural inequalities that underlie these processes, we need critical humanities. It is not until we introduce frameworks such as the ethics of knowledge production and dissemination, questions of who is producing and how that is being produced, access and inequalities, that the full extent of the implications of open research become evident.

    Historically, from the late nineteenth century, scholarly articles were published by learned societies which were generally not for profit. Then came commercial publishing houses who published academic books and journals and that is part of the reason why open access publishing is not universal. Removing a paywall for an online article is fairly simple as there is no physical product that needs to be produced. But still, there are costs associated with online publishing – copy-editing, formatting, typesetting, etc. A paywall is only removed when somebody (or some institution like a research body) pays the publisher to make the work open.

    Global South-North Disparities

    Access to large funds is still largely limited to the global north. Academic libraries in the UK for example, provide access to immense amounts of resources – books, articles, databases, archives – as well as facilities as seemingly simple as a 24 x 7 library with internet access. Universities in the global south are still unable to meet these. Hence, even with the removal of paywalls and subscription based journals, the knowledge being produced is churned unevenly in the global north.

    And because it is scholars and academics in the global north who gain access to the funds necessary to make their work open access, the narrative continues to be shaped by the knowledge produced by them. For context, the cost (Article Processing Fees) to make a journal article open access can range between £3,000 – £12,000.

    Ethics

    Another is the question of ethics – especially if one is working with sensitive or people-facing material. We must ask: how much should be made ‘open’?

    I have previously worked with vast amounts of personal letters that have ended up in British surveillance archives. I struggled with coming to terms with making these letters ‘open’, especially when they are taken out of context as ‘evidence’ for a claim. Methods of anonymisation, redaction and even withdrawal are immensely important while working with such material – and they must be written into the principles of Open Research.

    Academia is Extractive

    I can’t stress this enough, but academics and the capitalist system of academia is MASSIVELY extractive. To give an example, a researcher may travel to the depths of Afghanistan to study the legacies of the Soviet world. They are likely to hire a translator (as most academics in the UK or North America mostly write and speak only in English) and conduct interviews with living people. The ‘open’ research that they produce is likely to be in English. Will this work ever reach the communities that the knowledge was extracted from?

    Translation aside, frameworks of marginalisation and global inequalities are built off the knowledge gained from the most vulnerable in societies. Academic learn from communities, but there is very little they can offer back to them under the current systems. To truly make research open, an understanding of these processes is indispensable; humanities is indispensable.

  • Our Film in the Discovery Museum!

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    I’m so excited to share that the oral history film I worked on is now part of an exhibition at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle!

    The exhibition, Our Voice: Apni Aawaaz, opens on 21 July and runs until 10 November 2025. It celebrates the powerful, personal stories of first-generation South Asian women who made their lives in Newcastle’s West End. These women who made Newcastle their home have told their stories of friendship, community, and transformation. Working with them on this project has been one of the most emotional and creatively rewarding experiences of my life.

    The film was made in collaboration with New Writing North and Search Newcastle, with film-maker Julie Ballands and producer Jo Hislop, and myself as writer and facilitator.

    Our film brings their voices to the forefront through intimate interviews, old family photographs, and moments of deep reflection. It touches on themes of identity, migration, home, resistance, and sisterhood, and is rooted in a feminist spirit of care and collaboration.

    The exhibition is free and will be displayed in the Destination Tyneside gallery (Level 2) of the museum. I hope you get a chance to visit, and to hear these stories told in the women’s own voices—unfiltered, powerful, and full of life.

    More info here: Our Voice: Apni Aawaaz – Discovery Museum

  • The Language Between Us

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    Histories and South Asian Women in the West End

    I knew very little about life outside of India when I left four years ago, and my first window to the rest of the world was Newcastle upon Tyne. I thought this was what the UK was like. I thought Northumberland Street was what all streets looked like. I thought Leazes’ Park was what all parks were like. And walking down Westgate Road, I smelt so many smells, some familiar, but most of them new; I heard so many languages, some familiar, but most of them new. And then by the beach one day, I met an elderly fisherman who’d lived all his life in Wallsend – he said that it wasn’t always like this, in fact, this babble of languages and smells and people was something new to him, just as it was new to me.

    Since last summer, I have been working closely with a group of older Pakistani women in Newcastle, in an attempt to remember their stories and histories. I remember the first day we tried telling stories, we tried singing, writing, describing loosely, building a script. Some even suggested dancing to some Bollywood tracks. We heard stories of life in the west end in the sixties and seventies. You’d spend your day trying to think of new solutions to keep your home warm. There was only one fireplace.

    How do we dry our laundry in this land of constant rain? The ground smelled of rain and the air was ice cold.

    How many cigarettes were we expected to roll in the factories? How many cardigans could be knitted? How many skirts printed and sewn?

    But nothing seemed to quite bring it together. When you do a project, write a book or maybe tell a story, you are always told to find a throughline. What is it that holds everything together?

    And I thought I could hold it together with what I saw. I saw, how, for generations, the idea of the ‘South Asian woman’ was mute. When they spoke, they cried for help. Come rescue us.

    I saw how women’s stories were pushed beyond the boundaries of what was thought to be real history – Women tell fictions, they said. They said women’s stories were less true.

    I saw how telling a story almost always meant – Tell it in English, tell it in English or no one will hear you.

    I saw how, to explain who was baaji, aunty-ji, didi, daadi we would have to translate it.

    But didi in Bengali or baaji in Urdu does not mean older sister in English. It’s a form of its own network, something beyond bloodlines and kinship.

    I saw how the story of these women who I met every Tuesday at twelve o’clock, in a church, in the West End of the city, was the story of leaving homes, leaving lands and borders.

    …

    When I was a child, they made sure that I knew about the border. It was built on a line of blood, they told me. There is barbed wire and arms clutching at the wooden poles. On the other side, they are… different.

    Then, in the 2000s, I was still a little girl, but people from the other side of the border started to visit us. Fawad Khan, the Pakistani actor became every little girl’s crush – on our side of the border. Bollywood was making films about friendship between the two nations, Shah Rukh Khan, the biggest Bollywood actor was dancing to songs about this friendship. Singers and music were bringing us together, the music production house Coke Studio frequently brought musicians from both sides of the border to make some of the best songs in the 2000s and 2010s.

    And then, I don’t know much about what happened in Pakistan, but, in 2014, Narendra Modi of the far-right BJP was installed as Prime Minister of India. Overnight, the mood changed, the friendship, at least what was perceived, was gone.

    As I write this essay today, the two nations are at war again. On 22 April, twenty-five Indian people had travelled all the way to Kashmir, that land seeping in blood, but also in dreams. They say that when the Emperor of Hindustan, the Mughal Jahangir, lay his alcohol coated, tired eyes on Kashmir he screamed like a madman:  Gar Firdaus, ruh-e-zameen ast, hamin asto, hamin asto, hamin ast [‘If there is heaven on earth, It is this! It is this! It is this!]. He had found paradise.

    But on that summer morning in April, the twenty-five people travelling in Pahalgam in Kashmir, were killed. A little child of eleven was cornered by the Indian media, tell us, how was it? The boy’s father had just been murdered before his eyes.

    Overnight, all Pakistani television channels were banned in India. The Pakistani heart-throb, my childhood crush Fawad Khan had made an Indian movie after five years that was due to release later this summer. But, now the RSS, a right-wing militant group of the BJP have called for boycott.

    In India, if you utter the name Pakistan during a cricket match, you can be killed.

    Kashmiri students in India are being persecuted, their scholarships cancelled and they are under constant threat of public lynchings and death.

    In Haryana, Kashmiri shawl vendors who have covered the shivering bodies of Haryanvis for generations, have had to close shop and hide away.

    But what is all this to me? I am sitting in a 17th century mansion in the middle of Northumberland county, sipping coffee and eating lemon drizzle cake, and sighing over what’s lost.

    I can see only what I want to see, what I’ve wanted to see all this while.

    Maybe it was never there. It was unreal in my desperate reality. It was empty for me to imagine, tabula rasa.

    Maybe, when I was seven years old, I had already wished away the horror of the barbed wires at the Wagah Border.

    ……

    Maybe instead, I should ask what if?

    What if it was I who arrived, clutching my silk saree, wrapped around my head, at Central Station by the 3 o’clock from London? What if, before that train, I had travelled twelve hours from Lahore on a plane? And what if, before that plane, I had to pack my belongings and travel across the border from Aligarh in India?

    Maybe it was the winter of 1969, and I got off the train at Central Station and stepped outside, and there was snow. Snow piled up on either side of the road, snow on windowsills and shop doors. I looked up at the sky, and – believe it or not, it was falling from the sky!

    Maybe through time, I had the strength to clutch that snow between my palms and play with it, allow it to slip through my fingers, but only a little bit. I knew every street in the city, after all I’d spent twenty years working in almost every factory in Newcastle, until they closed them all down in the nineties. I knew all the people in this city, I knew how they met their wives and husbands, maybe I’d done a bit of matchmaking after I’d retired. And I knew all the neighbourhood gossip.

    Slowly the memories of the hot, parched land that grows the best mangoes, a thousand miles away, left my body; and slowly this city crept up my veins and mixed with my blood. Just like a girl who will come to this city in 2019; my first glimpse at the world was a glimpse at the streets of Newcastle.

    …

    And then in the summer of 2024, when her and me walked hand in hand down Neville Street, conspiring to take the 3 o’clock train to the Metro-centre and do a bit of shopping, they came after us. They said we do not belong here. They said we must go back.

    In Sunderland, they torched areas where people like us lived. Around the country, they marched because we lived here too. In Southport, they attacked the mosque. Elsewhere they attacked our homes, they attacked our shops. For a month I was afraid to step outside my house.

    And as I looked back at these sixty odd years, I thought to myself: But what am I to do with my ears full of gossip from this city? What am I to do with my English that sounds Geordie? What am I to do with my addiction to Yorkshire tea?

    What am I to do with the snow between my palms?

    …

    But later that summer, my people, my city marched down those very streets to protect us. It was a display of love, of solidarity and of friendships.

    And that’s what it means to make a film about South Asian women living in the west end of Newcastle upon Tyne. They live through time, they live through places and they live through languages. They are Pakistani as they are Geordies. They celebrate Eid in a Church. They drink Yorkshire tea spiced with cardamon and cloves. They know the snows of the seventies like they know all the road names today. They whisper family recipes of daal to you as they speak of the fabric-shop they had for years. They tell stories of this city that nobody else will tell you.

    Apni Aawaz – Our voice – is a glimpse into that story. It was made through several conversations, debates, tears, anger and laughter. It is a story about friendships, the friendships borne when you bring a cup of chai to another, the friendship that blooms when you exercise together, remember together, and tell stories together. But it is also the story of friendship between the women and the filmmaker, the filmmaker and the writer, the writer and the producer.

    …

    I performed a version of this essay at the opening of the film at John Marley Center in Newcastle upon Tyne in May 2025. The film Apni Aawaz was made through a partnership between New Writing North and Search Newcastle. I worked with a film-maker and a creative producer, I don’t have their permission to produce their names here so I am not doing so. Please feel free to contact me for more information.

  • রবীন্দ্রবিজ্ঞাপন [The Nationalistic Soap]

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    লাক্স সাবানকে আমাদের দেশে বরাবরই বলিউডের অভিনেত্রীরা endorse করে এসেছেন। এই কাজ ঐশ্বর্য রায়, কারিনা কাপুর থেকে নিয়ে দীপিকা পাডুকোন সকলেই একবার করে করেছেন। বিজ্ঞাপন নিয়ে যাঁরা কাজ করেন, তাঁরা নিশ্চই বলতে পারবেন, এই অভিনেত্রীদের দিয়ে লাক্স সাবানের endorsement করাবার পেছনে ভাবনাটি হল — আমরা যখন ওদের দেখব, আমাদের মনে হবে লাক্স সাবান মাখলে আমরাও ওদের মত হয়ে যাব!

    যাই হোক, ১৯০৬ এ “স্বদেশজাত সাবান” এর ব্র‍্যন্ড এমব্যাসাডার কে ছিলেন জানেন?None other than,  আমাদের রবি ঠাকুর! দুঃখের ব্যাপার আজ আর  স্বদেশজাত সাবান পাওয়া যায় না। নাহলে এই সাবান মেখেই আমাদের বাঙালিদের কবি হবার আশ মিটে যেত কি?

    ছবিটা ঢাকার বাংলা একাডেমি তে রাখা ‘নবনূর’ (আশ্বিন, ১৩১৩) পত্রিকা থেকে তুলেছি

    See English Translation

    Bollywood celebrities have endorsed Lux bathing soaps in our country for ages. Starts like Aishwarya Rai, Kareena Kapoor and Deepika Padukone have all taken up the task at different points in their careers. Perhaps those who work in advertisement would be able to confirm this, but one of the thoughts behind celebrity endorsement is to convince the people that if they use these products, they could easily turn into these celebrities!

    Anyway, any idea who the celebrity endorser was for the Swadeshbad Shabaan [Nationalistic Soap] in 1906?

    It was none other than our Rabindranath Tagore!

    Unfortunately, this nationalistic soap is no longer on the market. If it did, would the Bengali dream of poetry be realised through this soap?

  • The Bethune College Sensation

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    Growing up in a Bengali household in the early 2000s, you’d usually have Star Ananda blaring on the TV in the evenings. Even as a child, I remember my parents frequently saying: যাদবপুর ইউনিভার্সিটি সব সময়ে খবরে.1 At eighteen, I walked through the famous চার নম্বর গেট 2, and three months later, the student movement Hok Kolorob broke out. I thought my university was the most university — you know, this is the true meaning of university: to protest, to want to change, to learn to be restless. In fact, it was practically the only one doing it in the city.

    Then, many years later, in the little archive of the Bethune College, I came across the story of a group of young women’s protest in 1928. They protested the administration’s denial of their right to hartal. The story quickly hit the newspapers as The Bethune College Sensation. Women protesting, defending their right to strike, after all, was scandalous as it was dangerous.

    Their Principal, Miss Wright, another of my my favourite historical characters about whom I’ll perhaps write one day — threatened them in gradually advancing stages. First, she said that she would punish the students and report them to the government. Then, she said she would have their scholarships cancelled. When the women were still relentless, Miss Wright declared that if the students were determined to not come to classes, they would be punished by being expelled from the hostel.

    Article in The Forward on the 8th of February 1928, five days after the hartal.

    Miss Wright then asked them to write her an apology and sign a declaration saying that they would never disobey their principal again. I imagine the women students laughing at this – for next, they gained even more support.

    The following day they sent her a letter of solidarity with signatures of students representative from all years in the College. In short, their movement grew.

    About one month later, Miss Wright left not only her post as Principal of the Bethune College, but left India to retire in the quiet town of Ambleside in the Lake District of England.

    1. Jadavpur University is always on the news. ↩︎
    2. The Gate no.4 of the University that takes you to the Arts and Humanities departments. ↩︎

  • A Quietness in the Archive

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    There is a kind of silence that stays with you.

    Working in an archive, you notice that silence lingers not in the absence of sound, but in the absence of presence. When a name doesn’t appear in an index, when a page is torn, perhaps blackened out with ink, when the file that should be there isn’t.

    Or worse: when it is there, but says nothing. Empty.

    I’ve spent the last few years in archives all over the world. Police records, colonial correspondences, surveillance files, papers and papers and manuscripts written in illegible handwriting…

    Names and names

    And the same name again

    And again

    Then, gone.

    Another phrase: Suspect X

    Ex-Detenue

    Notorious                         

    Was the archive built to preserve names?

    Names of whom? You see, many colonial archives were built as intelligence, not for the memory of posterity but rather to tackle immediate ‘problems’.

    When I was younger and a lot less experienced with these archives, I’d often mistake repetition for importance, loudness for meaning. I remember sitting in the reading room of the West Bengal State Archive in Kolkata, running my fingers through the brittle pages that once passed through the hands of colonial officers. It was hard to come across documents – letters, notes, accounts that were written by the women I am researching. But there were some documents about them.

    There were intercepted personal letters that perhaps a young woman wrote to her dear friend – Please help me decide what to do, you know my soul. Am I ready for this, didi?

    These documents were scored, stamped and annotated by intelligence officers. I found something disorienting in that: reading private letters addressed to sisters, friends, mothers. Letters that never reached their destination. They remained there in the archive gathering what Carolyn Steedman called dust, passing through hands, read by so many people, and scored, and marked, and breached a thousand times.

    Looking at these documents, and the fragments through which women’s lives appear, I think about who gets remembered and how. I think about how dangerously close erasure is to forgetting. And I wonder what it must look like to write history from these gaps; not trying to fill them in, but understanding them and containing them.

    Silence is not the same as absence. Silence comes in layers, silence is deliberate. Silence protects just as it releases.

    In marking these silences and gaps, I do not wish to mourn the loss, nor do I want to romanticise them. I also don’t want to pretend to overcome it with books and theorising.

    But I can sit with it. I can write about it just as I am doing now.

    And, I can ask questions: Why isn’t this here?

    And maybe that’s where the work begins.

    Meghmala Bhattacharya's avatar

    Meghmala Bhattacharya