I am a cultural historian of modern South Asia with interests in colonial India, decolonization, nationalism, religion, and secularism. My recent book, entitled Chips from a Calcutta Workshop: Comparative Religion in Nineteenth Century India (Cambridge, 2025), explores the development and nature of comparative religion in nineteenth-century India. It focuses on the ideas and intellectual currents behind a range of thinkers who explored comparative religion in India, drawing on a variety of inspirations from Indian religions. Rather than emanate out of a European Christian set of politics as in the Western world, comparative religion emerged out of religious reform movements, including the Brāhmo Samaj in Bengal and the Arya Samaj in the Punjab. With chapters on Rammohan Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Keshab Chandra Sen, and Swami Vivekananda, the book includes a re-evaluation of familiar figures alongside lesser-known thinkers within an intellectual history of modern Indian comparative religion. My first book, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Oxford, 2014), examines Bengali Muslim intellectual history from the early twentieth century through the mid-twentieth century through an examination of Bengali Muslim literary figures, religious reformers, politicians, and public intellectuals from the early twentieth century to 1952.

My current book project explores the life and times of Taraknath Das, an Indian anti-colonial nationalist who spent most of his adult life in the U.S.A. and Canada from the early twentieth century through his death in 1958. One of the few Indian nationalists active in North America during the era of Asian exclusion, Das campaigned vigorously on behalf of Indian independence, earned a PhD at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, taught international relations at a number of American universities, and began a foundation to help Indian students in the U.S.A. in the 1930s. His life and movements shed light on a little known American chapter of the history of Indian nationalism, revealing historic changes in race, law, and education for Indian migrants in twentieth-century America.

Between 2015 and 2025, I held the  Tier II Canada Research Chair in global and comparative history at the University of Victoria. As part of this initiative, I convened the Global South Colloquium, a seminar series about the histories and politics in the Global South. This initiative featured collaboration with a number of centres and institutes at the University of Victoria on topics of decolonization, post/de-colonial studies, critical indigenous studies, and histories of empire and nation, including the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives, the Centre for Global Studies, and the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society. Based on workshops held by the Global South Colloquium, I have edited India after World History: Literature, Comparison, and Approaches to Globalization (Leiden, 2022) and South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labor, Law, and Wayward Lives (London, 2020).

Outside of the official archives I hold active interests in aesthetics, literary and cultural criticism, theater, performance studies, popular and public cultures. In this area, I have published Beyond Bollywood and Broadway: Plays from the South Asian Diaspora (Indiana, 2009), the first-ever collection of plays from South Asian diasporic playwrights from the U.S., the U.K., South Africa, and Canada. Other work in this area includes an edited roundtable (with Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Jamil Khoury) about Islam and contemporary theater in North America, entitled “The Dramaturgy of Political Violence: Performance, Representation, and Muslims in the Contemporary World,” in the December 2016 edition of Performing Islam. I have also jointly translated the first-ever English edition of Utpal Dutt’s Maanusher Adhikare (The Rights of Man), a 1968 Bengali play about the 1930s Scottsboro trials in Alabama, U.S.A.

nbose@uvic.ca

UVic Department of History Clearihue B234