Fellow Rupsa Nag

After completing her MA in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, India she pursued a joint Research Masters in Gender Studies from the University of York and Utrecht University where she recently graduated from. As a multidisciplinary researcher and cultural worker, Rupsa is interested in questions of home, nationhood, memory, trauma, history, embodiment, sexuality and the politics of visibility. Working with the Crafting Resistance collective for the Utrecht Centraal Museum´s exhibition Spuiten en Stikken revealed to her the question of textile, colonialism and slavery as these histories surfaced in her research on an 18th century embroidered herenvest. 

Her work engages in critically deepening our engagement with and experience of art and aesthetics refusing colonial and nationalist frameworks by underlining the epistemological violence and institutional complicity inherent in western colonial and postcolonial discourses that fail to adequately address the entanglement of caste and colonialism. In doing so she resists the homogenisation of the figure of the ‘colonised’ that obscures internal hierarchies and the collaboration of dominant caste groups with colonial powers wherein marginalised communities bore the brunt of exploitation and dispossession. Using textile as an entry point, she talks about neglected histories of caste and colonialism in her final work by studying 18th century Rijksmuseum textile collections and through a critical analysis of the Rijksmuseum ‘Special Collections: Ships, Arms and Fashion’ read in juxtaposition with VOC archives of textile and slave trade across the Indian Ocean.

Through this fellowship she took this exploration of textile trade and slavery further. Rupsa applied to the second edition of the Global Slavery History Fellowship, April-May 2025, an initiative carried out by a coalition of Amsterdam based archives, museums and sociohistorical institutes. Her work for this fellowship engaged with the histories of caste, colonialism, and slavery across the Indian Ocean.

In the course of the 2 month fellowship, her work was facilitated by the support of several people like Jacqueline Rutte, Dr Matthias van Rossum, Dr Manjusha Kuruppath, Dr Leo Lucassen, Britt van Duijvenvoorde, Rijksmuseum curator of history Maria Holtrop and curator of dress Vanessa Jones and her co-fellows Wisaal Abrahams, Thanya Fonkel and Shereen Lafhaj. She had the chance to briefly visit the Rijksmuseum to see a small part of their 17-18th century textile collection. She also met the GLOBALISE project team and was generously helped with resources and how to navigate them, especially the GLOBALISE and ESTA archives. Lastly, the IISH library played a crucial role to access books and archival material on textile trade and slavery across the Indian Ocean.