Atreyee Majumder

ATREYEE MAJUMDER, National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, India, was approved funding in September 2023 to aid research on “Love Among the Ruins: Tracing Melancholia in Vrindavan.” The grantee observed two sides of devotion in the past year of research in the Braj region of Uttar Pradesh, India — the aggressive commodification of religion that serves as a quick fix for anxieties of late capitalism and, on the other hand, the deeply mystical and self-effacing sides that were palpably present. This coexistence formed the fulcrum of the grantee’s journey into the ‘field’ of the city of Vrindavan and the Braj region. The grantee was able to travel a bit with film-maker Priya Sen who came down from Delhi to shoot videos for the research, and amassed a considerable audiovisual archive in the ten months of fieldwork. This material is being organized and uploaded onto a website (constellations.in). A contract with Penguin Random House India has been signed by the grantee to write a public-facing monograph on this ethnographic research and journey. Two ethnographic poems came out of this journey of the past year: one is forthcoming in Otherwise Magazine, and the other is under review at Anthropology and Humanism.