Dr Indranil Acharya is Professor of English at Vidyasagar University, West Bengal. He specializes in the documentation and translation of Bengali Dalit narratives on the tragic plight of Partition refugees and the victims of Bangladesh Liberation War (1971). Survival and Other Stories: Anthology of Bangla Dalit Stories (2012) and Listen to the Flames: Texts and Readings from the Margins (2016) are two major publications in this area. He has also researched on the documentation, translation and digital archiving of endangered languages and cultures of Eastern India. The Languages of West Bengal (2019) is a seminal publication in this field. Dr Acharya has led an indigenous literary movement in Eastern India through a multilingual publication titled Janajati Darpan (since 2017).
During his tenure as a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar, Dr Acharya intends to expand the scope of his archival research on endangered folk performance traditions of Bengal- a project he had been working on since 2013. Through the translation of some critically endangered folk forms, he wants to explore the issue of graded inequality among the ex-untouchables. He would also attempt to trace the continuities of such dying traditions among the Dalit diaspora in the United States.