Department of Sociology

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The present Department of Sociology was established as a combined Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology by the University of North Bengal in 1976. Professor Niren Ch. Choudhury, eminent anthropologist, was the first Professor and Head of the Department who provided the leadership in the formative years of the Department.Professor R.K.Bhadra and Dr.Namita Choudhury were associated with him since inception of this department and helped in the process of its development. The bifurcation between sociology and anthropology took place in 2001 and thus the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology was renamed Department of Sociology and a separate Department of Anthropology was established under the Science Faculty. From its beginning the Department of Sociology has been training students for three courses: M.A., M. Phil. and Ph.D. The Department has produced more than 30 Ph.Ds and more than one thousand Masters. Besides the two main programmes the Department invites visiting faculty, from the reputed national and international universities and the faculty of this department visit the universities abroad on visiting faculty programme and for attending seminars/conferences. The teachers of the Department encourage students to take part in academic discussions outside the class-room interaction and encourage them to present papers in seminars/conferences. In recognition of the good work done by the Department the University Grants’ Commission (UGC) has granted the Special Assistance Programme (DRS – 1) in 2007 which has facilitated undertaking a good number of research projects on issues relating to gender question and the problem of ethnicity in the North Bengal region. The Department has been organizing a national level seminar every year on the gender and ethnicity related issues, which constitute the focal theme of the SAP. As a part of the programme the Department publishes Occasional Papers and edited volumes based on the research articles that are produced under different SAP related programs.

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Author: search.filters.author.Bagchi, KeyaStart date: 2022

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    Everyday Living Body of Ma
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Bagchi, Keya
    The female body is always the point of curiosity, the centre of attraction and a matter of contemplation and contestation from time immemorial. The public “gaze” of both males and females is always fixed on her body. There has always been an endless social discussion on how she will dress, decorate, manipulate maintain or shape her body. It is a very prevalent picture in every era as is also in a modern or post-modern world. Alongside this public opinion about the female body, a woman’s body is always considered to be seductive, enigmatic and alluring. This female body seems very often to be a “desirable other” (Thapan 1995) as depicted in magazines, cinemas, advertisements, on the catwalk and so on. When a woman’s physical beauty is appreciated, she is perceived only based on her body about her sexuality. This “objectification” of the female body is much more emphasized than anything else. The whole process of the objectification of the body is closely related to sexuality which, according to Mackinnon, is ‘a dimension along which gender occurs and through which gender is socially constituted’ (1994:260). Thus, a female body is always a subject of rigid social judgement, evaluation and scrutiny. While talking about the body in everyday life vis-à-vis gender, it can, therefore, be argued that the gendered subject is neither a biological being nor even a psychological being, rather a social being (Thapan 1995) and a woman realizes social identity through experiencing her femininity in inter-subjective relationships with other people. This experience of femininity is closely intertwined with the complex matrix of class, caste, regional and socio-economic components. How a gendered subject is constructed by herself is once again the product of the process of social construction. In this paper, I will represent the visions of some women who have become mothers in their early thirties and living in the Malda Municipal area to explore how the physical embodiment of women is influenced by gender in everyday life with an emphasis on their realizations, wishes and imaginations.