Hota Agni Kumar

The graduate academic training  of Hota Agni Kumar was in the vernacular, which often limited his chances but was never a handicap in his  general pursuit of knowledge. At JNU his research interests were cultivated and directly linked to the cultural background of his vernacular exposure. He found himself, once he realized that for all the generation gap, his teachers at JNU and he belonged with each other. His supervisor Prof. KunalChakrabarti made him understand that familiarity with the cosmopolitan need not displace his innate verifying unconscious. His contact with his teachers had been thoroughly conscious. When Prof. R.Champakalakshmi was about to retire he became her last and only student in a course, one she especially created for him, on the polity in early historic and early medieval south India. He worked in two academic projects with Prof.B.D.Chattopadhyaya who moulded his bare interests into disciplinary abstractions and taught him how to be a detached observer of his own passions and how to express them in words.

His learning from these towering historians has contributed in both his course creation and teaching methodology as he introduces his students to the joys of independent learning.

His other interests revolve around religion, literature and classical and colonial laws.