Manas Dutta is a faculty member in the Department of History, Aliah University, Kolkata. Previously, he was a faculty in the Department of History, Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, West Bengal. His area of research covers issues related to war and conflict in South Asia, with a special focus on civil-military relations in the Global South. Along with this, he is also investigating, as part of his recent research on War and Genocide Studies, on the involvement of native Indian Soldiers in the First World War, with a special emphasis on their performance in the Western Front. He has received the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship (CWIT) for research in the British Library, National Archives of United Kingdom, Imperial War Museum, and SOAS Library, United Kingdom in 2016. In 2018, he has been awarded the ‘Summer Research Fellowship’ in the Institute of Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) in the New School for Social Research, New York, USA.

He is one of the members of the Postcolonial Studies Association of the Global South (PSAGS) and member of the Editorial board of various journals.

Forthcoming publication (monograph)

Recovering the Lost Histories of Valour: The Madras Army and the Colonial Apparatus in Nineteenth Century South India, 1807-1895, Routledge, ISBN: 9780367472016.

Recent publications (monograph)

Social Movements, Media and Civil Society in Contemporary India: Historical Trajectories of Public Protest and Political Mobilisation, Palgrave Macmillan, (2022), https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-94040-9.

‘War, armed forces, and society in North Bengal: A Colonial Perspective’ in Dipsikha Acharya et al. ed. Locating the Local in South Asia: Critical Themes in the History of Northern Bengal, Routledge, 2025.

‘The Indian Army in the East African Campaign, 1914-1918’ in Ashutosh Kumar and Claude Markovits eds., Indian Soldiers in the First World War: Revisiting a Global Conflict, Routledge, Abingdon/New York, 2021.

Completed projects

Recently, he has finished one project as Principal Investigator on The Naive and the Coloniser’s War: Exploring the Indian Soldier’s Contribution in the Great War, 1914- 1918 sponsored by the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) in 2022. (File No: 1-09/2017-ICHR (GIA-III) R

Finished one pilot archival project as co-investigator under the British Library Endangered Archives Programme (BL_EAP-1546), https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP1546

Ongoing project

Currently undertaking on major archival project as co-investigator under the British Library Endangered Archives Programme (BL_EAP-1718), https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP1718