Aditya Bahl

Professional Bio

Aditya Bahl works at the intersections of literary studies, critiques of political economy, and anthropology, with a particular interest in the longue durée of South Asia. Reading across disciplines, he combines ethnographic and archival methods in order to theorize how the literary problematic of “scale” – the shapeshifting frames of “regional,” “national,” and “world literature” –  is mediated by the historical evolution of capitalist crises and their global “fixes.”

Bahl brings these research interests together in his current book project, Green, Red: Revolutions and World Literature, which recovers a suppressed archive of small and underground magazines published in Punjab, popularly known as the “granary of India.” Starting in the 1960s, the Punjabi countryside was swiftly transformed by successive confrontations between Soviet diplomacy, the US-sponsored Green Revolution, and a Mao-inspired Naxalite insurgency. Out of these global churnings, there emerged a local literary movement known as jujharvad (lit. “of resistance”). The new magazines disseminated a series of homespun internationalisms across the Punjabi countryside, improvising a provocative bricolage of medieval Sufis and French structuralists, folk performers and plant scientists, Sikh gurus and Afro-Asian Maoists. Yet many magazines were also promptly outlawed, even destroyed, by state police. The surviving fragments are now scattered across several rural and peri-urban locations. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Green, Red returns this hyper-peripheral archive to the center of Cold War geopolitics. Working across literatures in Punjabi, Hindi, French, Urdu, and Persian, the book reconstructs how a fugitive laboratory of world literature surfaced in a Third World landscape dotted with seed farms, literary contact zones, and prisons.

An essay from the book project, “Green, Red: From Pragati to Jujhar in the Cold War Punjab,” appeared in the Oxford Companion to Modern Indian Literatures. Another essay – an experiment composed entirely of fieldwork entries – is forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of the Indian Avant-Garde.

Bahl regularly writes about art, literature and politics for a number of popular magazines, including Caravan, Himal, London Review of Books, The Nation, and New Left Review, among others. He is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry, including most recently, Mukt, published by the Organism for Poetic Research, based at the New York University.

Bahl earned his Ph.D. in English from Johns Hopkins University, where he was a Bailey Fellow, and his research was supported by various fellowships, including the Sidney Mintz Fieldwork fellowship, as well as multiple grants from Provost’s Office. During 2021-22, he was the Associate Editor of English Literary History, and in 2023, he was a fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies. Bahl earned his M.A. and MPhil in English from the University of Delhi. At Penn State, Bahl is jointly appointed in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies.