Portrait: Sharmila Sen

“There isn’t always a native language that people can turn to for writing or cultural expression,” declares Assistant Professor of English and American Literature and Language Sharmila Sen ’92. “Instead, people learn to mold and shape the language that they have.”

Such statements are indicative of Sen’s provocative method of examining text from a cultural and historical perspective. Through this inquiry into the choices in language and text, Sen’s work illuminates the space between what is and how we choose to represent it–how we locate a piece of art in the world.

Born in Calcutta, Sen moved to Cambridge, Mass. at the age of 12, where she attended public and alternative schools before becoming an undergraduate English concentrator at Harvard. After college, she taught in a small international school in the foothills of the Himalayas, an experience that helped her realize her passion for teaching and eventually motivated her to return to the United States to get her Ph.D.

Sen became fascinated with Anglophone literature. “I had all kinds of questions,” she says. “How did I, as a girl who grew up in Calcutta, know English? Why did so many writers in India choose to write in English?”

Sen began working at Harvard in fall of 1999, teaching courses in a subject area she ironically describes (in reference to the English intellectual Stuart Hall’s division of the world into “The West and the Rest”) as “the literature of the Rest.”

Though Sen is often identified as a postcolonial scholar, she is wary of that particular terminology. She innovatively turns the term on its head, saying “Postcolonial is a way of reading, not a way of writing.” In a similarly inventive way, her own work focuses on the ways in which language is used to categorize and portray, and the ways in which language is ineluctably tied to identity.

Sen speaks of languages as if they themselves are actors and have agency, describing them as “wily survivalists.” She posits that as languages get incorporated into cultures, they cease to be “foreign”. In the case of India, Sen says, “English is not a foreign language to India—how Indians speak it and write it, it’s another Indian language.”

Sen’s work brings into question the boundaries that are created by terms and definitions, and she appears to relish the rich ambiguity resulting from this blurring of binaries creates.

Sen also examines culture through the lens of consumption: food, recipes, and other food-related texts. She asks, smiling, “How does an entire region or nation become ‘spicy’? What does it mean to be spicy?”

While amusing on the surface, these seemingly comic questions lead into much bigger inquiries into the history of colonialism, the spice trade, issues of class and gender, and the words that artists choose to represent cultures. She says of recipes, “They are a cultural memory, a piece of text, art, that moves and evolves from one place to another.”

But anyone who thinks of Sen as playing into feminine Indian stereotypes should be wary—her focus on such texts as recipes serves not to probe the mundane; rather, this kind of inquiry into the experience of individuals (a person, a text) is rich and informative in a way that certain traditional research lacks. She also brings a vital realism to her scholarship, saying wryly that she always remembers being told that “there are worse things that can be done to a people than teaching them English.”

Sen is full of remarkable anecdotes, from how Worcestershire sauce was originally an Indian chutney to how Yale was first financed by Indian black pepper and textiles. But the power of her unique work comes from the combination of this engaging method of humor and storytelling and a critical awareness of the nuances of studying the literature of “the Rest.”

Her work challenges writers who create text to examine how and why they choose a given language, and simultaneously asks those who study this work to examine their own assumptions and lexicon.

And there are always more questions. “Art is so often about syncretism, about the breaking down of boundaries,” Sen reflects. “Yet when we study it, we categorize and label it. How do we deal with essential divide?”