Amartya Mukhopadhyay is a retired professor of political science and one-term chair at the University of Calcutta. He was formerly professor of political science, departmental chair for seven terms and dean, Faculty of Arts and Commerce, at the University of Kalyani. He has published in diverse areas, including social and political thought (in book Politics, Society and Colonialism: An Alternative Understanding of Tagore’s Responses, 2010); postcolonial theory (in book India in Russian Orientalism: Travel Narratives and Beyond, 2013); public policy analysis (in book Politics of Implementation: Mass Transportation Policy for Calcutta 1947–1989, 2002, and ‘Politics of Power Crisis in West Bengal: Linkages between Technical and Political Aspects of Policy Making’, in Politics in West Bengal: Institutions, Processes and Problems, ed. Rakhahari Chatterji, 1985); Indian politics (as in ‘Bearing Unusual Fruit: What Ails the Civil Society in (West) Bengal’, in Rethinking India’s Democracy, eds Malyasree Mukherjee and Nivedita Saha, 2017, and ‘Civil Social Initiatives in Bengal’, in West Bengal under the Left, 1977–2011, eds Rakhahari Chatterji and Partha Pratim Basu, 2018); IR theory and practice (in ‘Constriction of Choices and the Kashmir Solution’, in Conflict Resolution in the Post-Cold War Era, ed. Arun Kumar Banerji, 2000, and ‘ Theories of Foreign Policy Decision Making: Indian Context’, in Socialist Perspective XII, nos. 1 and 2, June 1984); and Bengali and English literature. He is a regular contributor to various webzines on cultural aspects of Bengali and Indian life. At present, he is engaged in and is much advanced in his translation of iconic Bengali folk tales and has taken to writing a novel. Father of two well-established children, Mukhopadhyay spends his time in reading, writing, performing daily chores and taking care of his wife. Mukhopadhyay is a loner and has modern Bengali poetry as his lifetime obsession.
