Aditya Bhattacharjee

Aditya Bhattacharjee is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Religious Studies (RELS). He developed a curiosity for narratives about Hindu divinities as a child through his grandmother’s bedtime stories. This boyhood inquisitiveness grew into a more sustained academic interest in transnational Hinduism that he’s explored through BA and MA degrees at McGill University. He continues this pursuit in his doctoral research on global worship communities dedicated to the Hindu deity Ganesha. He has an ancillary interest in the subject of interrelatedness between Hindu and Buddhist traditions in both pre-modern and modern Thailand.

Born in Bombay and raised in Bangkok, Aditya is a fluent speaker of Thai, Bengali, Tamil, Hindi, and French. Additionally, he has also studied Sanskrit and Pali at McGill, Penn and at the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), Pune. In 2019, he received the Award for Academic Excellence from the Khyentse Foundation to pursue ethnographic fieldwork at newly constructed Ganesha temples in Thailand’s Chachoengsao province. He has presented papers at various forums that include the Council on Thai Studies’ yearly meeting, and at the Association of Asian Studies’ annual conference in Asia.