Political Science

History

Year of Establishment : 1948

History of the department : The Department of Political Science was established in 1948. It is one of the oldest Political Science Departments in the country and its journey began in the high noon of India’s independence,
The founder-Head of the Department was Prof. Debendra Nath Banerjee. Eminent scholars like Professors D. N. Sen, R. C. Ghosh, N.C. Roy, S.K. Mukherjee, Mohit Bhattacharyya, Buddhadeva Bhattacharya, Asok Mukhopadhyay, Rakhahari Chatterjee, Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, among others, served the department.

The Department started its journey with the PG programme in the Asutosh Building of College Street Campus and shifted to its present location at the Alipore Campus in 1990.
In 1983, the M.Phil. Programme was introduced in the Department.
The PhD programme was remodelled with new requirements of one-semester coursework since 2009.
The CBCS with semester-based teaching commenced in 2018.

The Academic Journey : In its formative phase, the thrust areas of teaching and research were constitutional history, political philosophy and law. Great constitutionalists as a few of our earlier teachers were, they played a crucial role in the making of the country’s Constitution as they were consulted by the makers of our Constitution. Since the seventies, empirical and behavioural analysis, alongside an intensive focus on Marxian and socialist studies, held their sway. Since the 1990s, the focus gradually expanded to integrate a variety of approaches in an eclectic way reflecting mainly – though not exclusively - on issues of democracy, development and governance. Interdisciplinary perspectives generously interspersed with a diversity of research methods are increasingly being incorporated in the pedagogy and faculty research to meet the new-age challenges. The Department has been striving for expanding its social base by building partnerships with public policy-making bodies, advocacy groups, social sector organizations, think tanks and the general public in the coming years. It sees its role as the future leader in the larger Political Science community.

As an integral part of the journey, the department takes a sustained interest in reaching out to the larger community outside the university fraternity. The students of the department take special initiatives t extend their support to the socially marginalized like fundraising initiatives to support Sundarban Sramajibi Hospital (SSS) in remotely located Sarberia, South 24 Parganas and relief activities during Amphan Cyclone and COVID times.

Research Support Programmes

From 1980 to 1985, the Department successfully ran the ‘University Leadership Programme’ (ULP) under the auspices of the UGC for the improvement of undergraduate teaching and the production of quality reading material for undergraduate college teachers. Numerous seminars and workshops were held under the programme.
In 1989 the UGC brought this Department under its Special Assistance Programme by recognizing it as a Department of Special Assistance (DSA). Under this Programme, the Department was encouraged to conduct research on Indian Politics with special reference to Eastern and North-eastern regional politics. This Programme was run in two phases 1989-1994 and 1994-1999.
In 2006, the UGC awarded the Departmental Research Support (DRS) Programme with ‘Democratic Governance in Indian States’ as the new thrust area. Prof. Sobhanlal Datta Gupta was the coordinator of the DRS-I Programme.
After the successful completion of the first phase, the UGC granted two consecutive phases (II and III) under the coordinatorship of Prof. Samir Kumar Das. The thrust area of the second phase was ‘Democratic Governance: India as the Nucleus of South Asia’, while that of the third phase is ‘Democratic Governance: Comparative Perspectives’. Under the DRS Programme, every year one national seminar, one college teachers’ workshop, along with a students’ seminar and policy interface with other universities/research institutes/voluntary groups have been organized. Moreover, two books and a good number of occasional papers under the series on ‘Papers on Democratic Governance’ were published under this Programme. The UGC recognized our DRS Programme as ‘one of the best run’ DRS programmes in Political Science in the country.
Major Research Project under UGC UPE-I was the comparative study on democratic experience in Assam, Bihar and West Bengal. The thrust area under the UGC UPE-II programme was Reimagining Southeast Asia from India’s Northeast and Bengal: Culture, Connectivity and Development.

Academic

Faculty Members :

Name	Designation	Area of specialisation	Email
Samir Kumar Das [Profile]	Professor	Ethnic Politics, Migration Studies, Democratic Theory and Politics	[email protected] [email protected]
Dipankar Sinha [Profile]	Professor	Communication and Development studies	[email protected]
Sonali Chakravarti Banerjee [Profile]	Professor	Public-Private Partnerships; Micro-Finance and MicroCredit; Local Government and Politics; Politics of Other Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes; Gender and Women’s Empowerment; Homelessness	[email protected]
Kaberi Chakrabarti [Profile]	Associate Professor	Politics of Communication, Gender and media	[email protected] [email protected]
Anindya Batabyal [Profile]	Associate Professor & HOD	Theory Building in International Relations and Environmental Politics	[email protected]
Avipsu Halder [Profile]	Assistant Professor	International Relations, International Political Economy, Globalization	[email protected]
Jigme Yeshe Lama [Profile]	Assistant Professor	International Relations, Critical Studies, Sino-Tibetan Studies	[email protected] [email protected]
Md. Hasan [Profile]	Assistant Professor	Public Administration	[email protected]
Debarati Das [Profile]	Assistant Professor	Indian Nationalist Movement, Intellectual History, Gender Studies	[email protected] [email protected]
Asis Mistry [Profile]	Assistant Professor	Ethnic and Nationalist Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, Comparative Politics	[email protected] [email protected]
Himadri Chatterjee [Profile]	Assistant Professor	Political Economy, Refugee Studies, Caste and Discrimination Studies, Urban Development	[email protected] [email protected]

Courses :

Programme	Level of study	Eligibility	Intake capacity
M.A.	P.G.	B.A. (Hons in Political Science)	265
M.Phil. (till 2021)	Post-P.G.	University criterion	-
Ph.D.	Research	University criterion	Not fixed

Research

Collaborations :

Title of the programme	Name and address of the collaborating institution
Erasmus Mundus Programme on Human Rights and Practice and Policy	University of Roehampton \| London \| SW15 5PU
UGC DRS Programme-I on Democratic Governance	SIPRD Kalyani, Kalyani, West Bengal
	SHIS, Bhangar

Thrust areas in teaching and research of the academic department/ centre :

Political Theory and Thought
Indian Politics
Public Administration
Ethnic Politics
Migration Studies
Minority Studies
Gender Studies
Media and Communication Studies
Democratic Governance

Major activities :

Seminars/ Workshops/ Symposium/ Webinars:

Year	Name of the workshop/ seminar	Date From – To
2016	Adivasi Aesthetics/Adivasi Politics: a dialogue in the making by Professor Daniel Rycroft	11-08-2016
2016	Talk on Peace Studies by Professor Priyankar Upadhayaya, BHU	03-10-2016
2016	Talk by Prof. Keith Lilley	22-11-2016
2017	Young Researcher's Colloquium on Power, Resistance and Accomodation in Post-Liberalisation India: Issues and Contestations	17-01-2017
2017	Seminar on Bollywood, Neoliberalism, Cities by Dr. Sarunar Paunkris, Kaunus University of Technology	03-03-2017
2017	Lecture on Chinain India's Look East Policy by Prof. Swaran Singh, CIPOD, JNU	08-03-2017
2017	Public Seminar jointly organised with Council for Political Studies	12-04-2017
2017	Talk on 'Placing the Urban in its Rural Context: Insights from Census Towns in WestBengal, India by Dr. Srilata Sarcar, Lund University	17-08-2017
2017	Lecture on Vernacular Democracy and Politics of Relationships: A subaltern perspective on contemporary India by Prof. Akio Tanabe, Tokyo University	05-09-2017
2017	Seminar on 'Finding India in China: Travels to the lesser known by Dr. Anurag Mohanty Vishwanath	01-11-2017
2018	Tri-departmental Seminar on Challenges of Development, Governance and Democracy in South and South-East Asia organised with Department of Economics and Centre for Urban Economic Studies, University of Calcutta	4/1/2018 - 5/1/2018
2018	Talk on 'The Benefits and Pitfalls of State Action" by Prof. Dan Banik, University of Oslo	08-01-2018
2018	Open House Discussion on Assembly Elections in India's North-East States - Issues and Perspectives	16-03-2018
2018	Department Seminar on "Dis/Order in Politics: Global and Local"	27-03-2018
2018	Seminar on "Bengali Muslims in the New Economy" organised jointly with Institute of Foreign Policy Studies	25-04-2018
2018	Summer School - Studies in Governance	6/9/2018 - 27/9/2018
2018	Talk on Governance by Prof. Neera Chandhoke, University of Delhi	20-09-2018
2018	Talk on Tibet and Himalayas by Research Scholars from Tibet Policy Institute, Dharamsala	01-10-2018
2018	Talk on "Dialogue between the Pasts" by Prof. M. Tiotonova, Linnoping University, Sweden	03-10-2018
2019	Talk on "Is Corruption Growth - Enhancing in Autocracy by Dr. Srabani Saha	18-01-2019
2019	Seminar on "Development and Democracy in Bangladesh" by Dr. Kamrul Hasan	21-01-2019
2019	Department Seminar on "Redefining the Political"	13-02-2019
2019	DRS III Seminar on "Indian Democracy on the Eve of Elections	25-03-2019
2019	UGC DRS III National Seminar on "Democracy as a Pedagogical Experience"	29/3/2019 - 30/3/2019
2019	Seminar on "Sustainability, Conflict and the Global System Crisis: Assam's Forgotten Nomads" by Sujata Dutta Hazarika and Saurabh Garg	18-04-2019
2019	National Seminar on "Imagining Southeast Asia from Bengal and India's North-east: Methodological Explorations	19/9/2019 - 20/9/2019
2019	Lecture on "A Comparative Study of Environmental NGO's between China and India" by Prof. Zhang Shulan, Shandong University, PRC	27-09-2019
2019	Seminar on "Tawang and the Emerging Dynamics in the Borderland" by Dr. M. Mayillvaganan, NIAS	18-12-2019
2020	Department Seminar on "Interrogating Non/Violence in Politics"	18-02-2020
2021	Webinar on Talibanization of Afghanistan: Imperatives for India	16-11-2021
2021	Webinar on The Game of “Cultural Misrecognition”: West Bengal since 2011	29-10-2021
2021	Virtual Roundtable on Contemporary Issues	08-10-2021
2021	Two Day’s Students Webinar on Populism Development and Democracy	02-07-2021 & 03-07-2021
2021	Online Lecture on Marxism and Post-modernism	19-04-2021
2022	One Day Students Webinar on Politicising Our Times: National and Global Perspective	30-04-2022
2022	Democracy and Nationalism: Exploring the South Asian Perspectives (Virtual Round Table)	07-02-2022
2022	Webinar on Commemorating 75 Years of Independence	12-08-2022

Other Activities: At a glance

The Department has been organizing a series of Refresher Courses on regular basis since 1994. The overall response has been overwhelming.
The Department regularly organizes seminars, workshops, and conferences with distinguished scholars of national and foreign institutions, undergraduate and postgraduate faculties of different universities and students.
The Department publishes the journal, viz. The Calcutta Journal of Political Studies.
Policy Interfaces are organized with other Universities/Research institutions and NGOs on a regular basis.
The department boasts of a rich publication of monographs by faculties, visiting scholars and students. It has published two books under the DRS Programme.
The Department has organized Mock Parliament competitions for the students in collaboration with the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs, Government of India. Each year, dedicated student seminars are organized to widen the academic horizon of learning. The students of the Department have taken a sustained interest in reaching out to the socially marginalized, particularly during Covid times.
Students run their own wall magazine, The Mirror.

Contact

Campus : Alipore (Shahid Kshudiram Siksha Prangan)

Address for communication : Department of Political Science, 1 Reformatory Street, Alipur, Kolkata 700027

University of Calcutta