Manish Jain is an Assistant Professor at the School of Education Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD). Before joining AUD, he taught in a school for ten years and later joined Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai as a faculty member. Manish’s teaching and research interests lie at the intersections of history, politics and sociology of education. His PhD research was a comparative study of citizenship and civics curriculum in two British colonies, India and Canada.

Manish is a Co-Principal Investigator on the Sociohistorical Study of the Language and Literacy project. He hopes to contribute to the conceptualization of the design and conduct of the research and participate in writing/dissemination activities.

Rahul Mukhopadhyay is a Visiting Faculty with the School of Education, Azim Premji University, Bangalore. His doctoral work was on Anthropology of Education Bureaucracy. His research interests are sociology of education, educational policy, sociology of organisations, and anthropology of the state. He has researched and published in the following areas related to elementary education in India: ‘Right to Education’, ‘educational institutions and policies’, and ‘quality in education’.

Rahul will be involved with the Bengal component of the study, which will primarily focus on pathshalas or indigenous schools that were quite widespread across almost the entire period of colonial rule and catered to almost all castes and classes of the local population. Not trained in either history or early literacy, Rahul hopes the study will be a good learning experience for him, though he is not sure whether it will be for the others who he will be constantly bothering with his queries!

Rajat is supporting the Bengal component of the Socio-Historical study. Rajat Kanti Sur did his graduation (with honours) in Political Science and Masters in South and South-East Asian Studies from the University of Calcutta. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD on the evolution of urban popular street culture in Calcutta (1930-1990s).  As a research and archive assistant Rajat was associated with several institutions and scholars. He was associated with the Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Archive of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, National Library, Calcutta Research Group and many universities in India and some abroad.