I started DH as an M.A. student in 2001 researching digital games and storytelling. Having faced much academic ostracism back then, it is heartening to see the interest in gaming cultures and (the) digital humanities, today. I completed my MPhil on videogames and narratives from Jadavpur University in 2005 (being probably the videogames researcher from India) and my PhD from Nottingham Trent University in 2008. My DH journey has taken me to various parts of India and abroad for keynote lectures, conferences and workshops.
At Presidency University, I organised the first international DH conference as early as 2012 bringing together scholars of national and international repute. After two such workshops involving national and international experts such as Amlan Dasgupta, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Barry Atkins, Liz Losh and Mark Bernstein as well as many early-career researchers, I led the DH initiative at Presidency (with Milinda Banerjee) for a UKIERI project on a digital archive of the Scottish Cemetery in Kolkata and also a project on the Dutch cemetery in Chinsurah. This was followed by a privately-funded project on the 19th-century Bengali industrialist, Mutty Lall Seal. I also assisted with the pioneering research of Padmini Ray Murray in creating the first ever survey-database on the gaming industry and culture in India. Presidency University has been offering a GE course on DH for UG first-years since 2013 and has invited experts such Padmini, Amlan Dasgupta, Sandy Baldwin and Shailesh Prabhu.
My games-studies work centres around gaming cultures, narratives in digital games and also the much-neglected issues of diversity, especially in terms of (the lack of) Postcolonial discourses in the area. Having worked in the area for two decades now, it is perhaps my greatest honour to be named DiGRA Distinguished Scholar in 2019. I have two books on game studies: Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books (2015, Palgrave Macmillan) and The Empire Plays Back: Videogames and Postcolonialism (2017, Springer UK/Palgrave). I have co-edited a special issue on videogames and postcolonialism in the Open Library of Humanities and I have been the representative of the DiGRA Diversity Group since its inception.
Student projects: Dutch Cemetery in Chinsurah, Scots’ Cemetery in Kolkata, Mutty Lall Seal archive and Plaques of Presidency (ongoing).
DHARTI 