Aditya Bhattacharya

Current Research Interests:

Before joining the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan as a PhD researcher, I did my B.A. (Honours), M.A. and M. Phil. from the Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India (2015-2023). In the last semester of my M.A. course, I began to explore such rules and regulations of the Dharmaśāstras (Brāhmaṇical/ Hindu juridical literature) that were related to children. I took the research further in my M. Phil. dissertation titled “The ‘Child’ in the Household: The Brahmanical Paradigm in Early Indian History (c. 300 BCE – 700 CE)”. There I mostly consulted the Sanskrit juridical literature in order to show the ‘ideal’ position of children in the Brāhmaṇical/ Hindu household of early India.         

My present research is an elaborate version of my previous attempts. I am looking at an array of Sanskrit literary sources for my PhD dissertation on the history of children and childhood in ancient India. Besides the juridical literatures (the Dharmaśāstras), I am also consulting ancient medical texts (Āyurveda), Sanskrit epics (the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata) and some Sanskrit literary texts such as poetry (śravya-kāvya), play (dṛśya-kāvya), biography (carita) etc. I would like to bring together certain aspects of childhood, such as physical and medical aspects, life-cycle rituals, legal rights, education, child marriage, training of the princes etc., and set those in the broader context of the Brahmanical household of ancient India.

Languages:

Bengali; Sanskrit