Sharmila Purkayastha Editor & Author

Saswati Sengupta, Shampa Roy and Sharmila Purkayastha are Associate Professors of English at Miranda House, Delhi University, who explore the social and material relations in cultural narratives. As part of the Miranda House collective they have engaged with a classical Sanskrit text (Revisiting Abhijñānaśākuntalam, Sengupta and Tandon ed., 2012) and a modern Indian novel (Towards Freedom: Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore’s Home and the World, Sengupta, Roy and Purkayastha ed., 2007) before turning to the 'Bad' Women of Bombay Films.
Outside their collective endeavour, Saswati has contributed to Goddesses:The Oxford History of Hinduism(2018), and her novel, The Song Seekers (2011), was long listed for the DSC award for South Asian Literature. Shampa has published In Zenanas and Beyond (2011) and Gender and Criminality in Bangla Crime Narratives (2017). She also translates early Bangla crime narratives into English. Sharmila is currently working on women’s prison writings of the 1970s in India and in Latin America.