Debayudh Chatterjee (English) is a 2025–2026 HRI Graduate Fellow. His dissertation, which examines progressive Indian literature and cinema from the late 1980s to 2014, raises the questions: What stories emerge from places rapidly transformed after the global collapse of socialism? Is there a lingering sense of mourning and melancholy for a lost world or a sustained interest in reconstructing progressive visions?
Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students through a year of dedicated research and writing in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment.
What is unique about your research on this topic?
My doctoral research examines progressive Indian literature and cinema in the post–Cold War, post-socialist milieu, a period shaped by the entrenchment of neoliberalism and the rise of communal fanaticism. Contrary to triumphalist claims that the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe during the late 1980s and early 1990s marked the definitive end of the socialist project, I argue that, in the Indian context, progressive writers and filmmakers forged a renewed idiom of left-wing resistance to the systemic social and economic oppressions intensified by globalization. This emergent leftist consciousness functioned simultaneously as a critique of twentieth-century communism and as a rearticulation of its emancipatory ideals under altered historical conditions. More specifically, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s proposition that the specter of Marx would continue to haunt the “new world order,” my work explores how memories of the militant left Naxalite movement (1967–75) were mobilized across cultural texts to interrogate what Mark Fisher terms capitalist realism.
What drives your interest in this research?
I was born and raised in the Indian state of West Bengal, where a left-wing government remained in power until 2011. Within a few years, the center-left government at the national level was replaced by a far-right administration, and many of the values that had shaped my intellectual formation came under threat amid the rise of a brazen anti-intellectualism. As similar right-wing projects gained traction in other parts of the world, renewed forms of resistance and mass mobilization, often involving younger generations and spearheaded by a new cohort of leftist leaders, began to gain visibility. Even ostensibly liberal publications such as The Economist were compelled to acknowledge the growing appeal of what has been termed “millennial socialism.”
This convergence of developments prompted a central question that animates my dissertation: how did socialism, so confidently declared obsolete nearly three decades ago, reemerge as a compelling political and cultural force? As I began conceptualizing my dissertation during the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was drawn to trace this trajectory through literature and cinema in my country. In light of the profound shifts in global and Indian politics over the past few years, this project is more urgent than ever.
How has the fellowship seminar shaped the way you’re approaching your research?
As I approach the completion of my dissertation and prepare for my thesis defense, I have come to fully appreciate the immense value of the Fellows Seminar. I chose to share the chapter I considered the weakest, and during the seminar, my colleagues, having read it with remarkable care, brought their diverse expertise and offered incisive feedback that helped me develop a significantly stronger draft. Equally important, they provided encouragement and moral support at a moment when such affirmation is especially vital for any PhD candidate. I must confess that being an HRI Fellow has been an experience of a lifetime. It stands among the finest opportunities that the University of Illinois offers!