Durba Mitra studies gender in South Asia

Harvard’s first professor appointed solely in gender studies

Durba Mitra

Photograph courtesy of Durba Mitra

Three vintage Bollywood posters brighten Durba Mitra’s basement office in Boylston Hall, each representing an archetype of the Indian woman: Mughal-e-Azam, a classic film about a Mughal courtesan’s doomed romance; Daasi, about a low-caste woman; and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, depicting “the well-behaved housewife,” Mitra says. “So I have all of these ‘types’ of women.” Indian cinema is a personal interest for Mitra, an assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality, but it also reflects her scholarly interest in gender in South Asia. As a graduate student at Emory, she remembers, “I thought I would write a history of prostitution in modern India. But I realized that to do that, I had to ask bigger questions. Why was a person considered a prostitute? When a woman is called a prostitute, she’s often, in fact, not one.” Her first book considers, more narrowly, how prostitution is linked to ideas about social progress in modern India. Mitra views herself as “a historian, first and foremost,” and gender studies as a commitment “to foregrounding gender and sexuality as important analytical categories in many disciplines” where often “gender is seen as an aftereffect of ‘real’ politics.” Mitra saw gender from a young age, she says, perhaps the result of an upbringing that set her apart from her North Dakota peers. Her mother, an immigrant from India, raised two children alone while working and pursuing a Ph.D. “She not only pushed to be independent and intellectual, she also adhered to her own imagination of her culture. She wore a sari every day in Fargo in the ’80s,” Mitra says. “People imagine the South Asian immigrant as a person who’s constrained by family expectations. That was not my experience. My mom always wanted me to imagine different possibilities.”

Read more articles by Marina N. Bolotnikova

You might also like

Five Questions with Andrew Knoll

A paleontologist on how to understand Earth’s biggest extinction event

Harvard Professor Michael Sandel Wins Philosophy’s Berggruen Prize

The creator of the popular ‘Justice’ course receives a $1 million award.

Harvard Economist Wolfram Schlenker Is Tackling Climate Change

How extreme heat affects our land—and our food supply 

Most popular

What Trump Means for John Roberts’s Legacy

Executive power is on the docket at the Supreme Court.

Harvard’s Class of 2029 Reflects Shifts in Racial Makeup After Affirmative Action Ends

International students continue to enroll amid political uncertainty; mandatory SATs lead to a drop in applications.

The Harvard Professor Who Quantified Democracy

Erica Chenoweth’s data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.

Explore More From Current Issue

A woman (Julia Child) struggles to carry a tall stack of books while approaching a building.

Highlights from Harvard’s Past

The rise of Cambridge cyclists, a lettuce boycott, and Julia Child’s cookbooks

A lively concert in a modern auditorium with an audience seated on multiple levels.

Concerts and Carols at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Tuning into one of Boston's best chamber music halls 

Wadsworth House with green shutters and red brick chimneys, surrounded by trees and other buildings.

Wadsworth House Nears 300

The building is a microcosm of Harvard’s history—and the history of the United States.