Areas of interest
Post-partition East Punjab (India), aesthetic and the subversive, art and identity, and history and memory in cultural production.
Education
- PhD, Asian Studies, UBC
- MA, Film and Broadcast Media, Mass Communication Research Centre, JMI, New Delhi
- MA, Political Studies, Jawahar Lal Nehru University, New Delhi
- BA (Honours), Political Science, University of Delhi, Delhi
Biography
Ajay Bhardwaj is a filmmaker and scholar whose work meditates on the relationship between aesthetic and subversive, art and identity, and history and memory. In his long stint as a documentary filmmaker, he explored the northwestern state of Punjab in India for a decade. This phase culminated in his Punjab trilogy—a set of documentaries located at the intersection of Dalit religiosity, performance traditions, and memories of partition. Bhardwaj is a recipient of the Public Scholars Award at the University of British Columbia, where he recently completed his PhD on South Asian Left-wing cultural activism in British Columbia. The doctoral documentary, "When the Tide Goes Out," accompanying his dissertation that examines representational absences in multimedia archive, has been selected for screening at the Vancouver International South Asian Film Festival 2022.