Dr Somnath Batabyal

Somnath Batabyal has a Master’s in Anthropology and a PhD from SOAS and was Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of Heidelberg, Cluster of Excellence from 2010 to 2012. 

Before he joined academia, Somnath was an award-winning investigative journalist and had worked in both print and television in India and the UK for over a decade, an association he continues as occasional columnist and regular radio commentator and analyst. His work focuses on the politics of news production and understanding journalistic practices through grounded ethnography. He is also interested in Development discourse, especially concerning environmental politics, climate change narratives and their influence on policy.

Somnath is also fascinated by fiction in research and writing and exploring the spaces between fact and possibility. In his forthcoming work The Migrants (working title) Somnath uses a disorganised narrative that plays in the shadows of subjectivities, in fragments of memory and possibility, re-storying lives lived, half-lived and unlived. 

In 2013, Somnath published his first work of fiction, The Price You Pay, which explores the interconnected worlds of journalism and policing in Delhi from the perspective of a young crime reporter. He is presently commissioned to write an OTT series on political spin doctoring and journalism in India.