Bio

Suchetana Banerjee is a comparatist, teacher, and theatre director with over two decades of sustained engagement in performance practices. She holds an MPhil and PhD from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and currently teaches literature and theatre at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune. Prior to joining SSLA, she taught Liberal Arts at IIT Bhilai and played a key role in the conceptualisation and development of Sahapedia, India’s open-access digital encyclopaedia on arts, cultures, and heritage.

Her doctoral research is situated at the intersection of theatre, literature, and history and continues to inform her broader scholarly engagement with Comparative Literature, Cultural Theory, and Performance Studies. Her work foregrounds questions of difference, otherness, and cross-cultural reception, moving beyond thematic comparison to examine how plural cultures are produced, embodied, and transmitted through literature, performance, devotion, and everyday cultural practices.

Her research has been widely published with reputed national and international presses, including A. Yu. Krymskyi Institute of Oriental Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Peter Lang (Brussels), Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Orient Blackswan, and Jadavpur University, as well as in peer-reviewed international journals. Her publications engage with themes such as performance as knowledge, translation and inter-systemic reception, popular theatre and political culture, pilgrimage and devotion, and the politics of representation in South Asian and Global South contexts. She is currently translating a biography of the 19th century dramaturg Girish Chandra Ghosh by Utpal Dutt from Bangla to English.

She is currently leading an ongoing research project titled “Traditions of Devotion,” initially funded by Symbiosis International University (SIU) and presently supported by the Pune Chapter of INTACH. The project focuses on documenting, analysing, and theorising living devotional practices through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, oral histories, and performance analysis, reflecting her enduring commitment to cultural documentation, interdisciplinary scholarship, and the preservation of intangible cultural heritage.