Gautam Vishal is an award-winning researcher in the anthropology of Music based at King’s College London.

Working under the aegis of the London Arts and Humanities Partnership(LAHP) of the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), his work engages with the documentation and ethnography of folksongs from a less-explored region in India, i.e. Bhagalpur in Bihar. With a Master's in English Literature, his work seeks to use documentation and archiving while understanding the critical underpinnings of the anthropocentric, feminist and caste-class concerns within the narrative of Behula & Bisahari.

He plans to work with community performers and practitioners to establish a living repository of this cultural practice and seeks to use his work to launch a people’s movement to revive the dead river Champa, which was the socio-cultural and economic lifeline of the region in the past.

His work straddles the mediums of Music, Painting and Activism. This project tries to put them in conversation with the cultural past and present of the region to understand and ensure their survival in the future.

Research interests

• Ethnography and Vulnerability
• Archiving and Cultural Fossilization
• Survival and Anthropocene
• LGBTQ+ Hindi Cinema and Print Culture in 1950s India

His work is supervised by Professor Katherine Butler Schofield from the Department of Music and Dr Priyanka Basu from the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries.

Teaching

Gautam Vishal has engaged in teaching both B.A. and M.A. students at St. Xavier's College (Autonomous) in Ranchi, Jharkhand, India. He has taught modules on: 1. Romanticism, the Sublime and Visual Arts Tradition; 2. Indo-Anglian Writings; 3. Feminism; 4. Deconstruction and Post-Structuralism.