August 2026

I wrote about my memories as a teenage girl with straightened black hair and nails, listening to Kurt Cobain, consuming vampire romances and living amid the growing political violence in the Darjeeling hills. One incident had stayed and haunted me for years, the assassination of opposition leader Madan Tamang one morning, in front of a restaurant where my Maa and Baba often took us on Sundays.

The essay was published in The Bombay Literary Magazine in August 2026.

You can read it here: Easter In Darjeeling – The Bombay Literary Magazine | TBLM

Citation

Malya. ‘Easter in Darjeeling’ (August, 2026), The Bombay Literary Magazine, 64.

March 2026

My research essay on the 1928 student protests at the women’s Bethune College in what was then Calcutta. The women were defending their right to protest against the Simon Commission. I learnt about them as a student in the city almost 90 years later. By the time I was writing about them, my feelings about writing academic works had already become quite complicated. I was unable to take myself out of my research, and was thinking about ways in which to reconstruct histories that only exist in puzzling and fleeting remains.

After much discussions with (and try to convince) the editors of my methods, it was finally published in Gender and History.

You can read it here: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.70032

Citation

Bhattacharya, Meghmala. ‘The Bethune College Sensation: Gender, Archive and Radical Passivity’, (2026) Gender & History,  https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.70032

December 2024

I had a friend who walked the streets of Kolkata with me, tracing addresses from hundred years back. We were trying to find the homes, descendants, memories, families of eleven women, who had written a sharp letter of criticism, to arguable the most important national leader of the times: a Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Gandhi had, in a article in his Harijan, said that the ‘modern woman’ wears makeup and dresses up to attract male attention, and that his non-violent politics was not for them. In reply, the eleven women whom my friend and I were trying to find had written to him objecting to these comments.

After several days, we found the niece of one of the letterers. I then began learning about Kamala Dasgupta as her niece brought out her letters, notebooks, diaries and other memorabilia. Among them was a framed photograph of a 5 inch pistol.

The essay won me a prize in 2023 from the British Association of South Asian Studies. It is a reflection on that framed photograph.

You can read it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09584935.2024.2413648

Citation

Bhattacharya, Meghmala. ‘History, Memory and Memorabilia: Kamala Dasgupta and the Politics of Remembering Revolutionary Bengal’. (2024) Contemporary South Asia, 32:4, pp. 548-562 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09584935.2024.2413648