Education:
Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University, 2024
M.Phil. University of Delhi, 2015
M.A. University of Delhi, 2013
B.Tech. National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, 2010
Personal Website: https://www.adityabahl.com
Interests:
Critical Theory, Postcolonial Literatures, South Asian Literatures, Poetry and Poetics, Intellectual History, Anthropology and Literature, Political Economy
Information:
Aditya Bahl works at the intersections of literary studies, critiques of political economy, and anthropology, with a particular interest in the longue durée of South Asia. Bahl brings these research interests together in his current book project, Green, Red: Revolutions and World Literature, which recovers a suppressed archive of small and underground magazines published in Punjab, popularly known as the “granary of India.”
Starting in the 1960s, the Punjabi countryside was swiftly transformed by successive confrontations between Soviet diplomacy, the US-sponsored Green Revolution, and a Mao-inspired Naxalite insurgency. Triggered by these global churnings, a new print revolution was born in Punjab. Although circulating in the backwaters of an agrarian society, these new magazines improvised a homespun internationalism that blended medieval Sufis and French structuralists, folk performers and plant scientists, Sikh gurus and Afro-Asian Maoists. Many magazines, however, were promptly outlawed, even destroyed, by state police. The surviving fragments are now scattered across several rural and peri-urban locations. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Green, Red returns this hyper-peripheral archive to the center of Cold War geopolitics. Working across literatures in Punjabi, Hindi, French, Urdu, and Persian, the book reconstructs how a fugitive laboratory of world literature surfaced in a Third World landscape dotted with seed farms, literary contact zones, and prisons.
Bahl regularly writes about literature and politics for a number of popular magazines, including Caravan, Himal, London Review of Books, The Nation, and New Left Review. He is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry, including most recently, Mukt, published by the Organism for Poetic Research, based at the New York University.