Arka Chakraborty

Arka Chakraborty researches popular music, Anglophone subcultures and ephemeral histories in South Asia. 

As a music historian, he specialises in recovering the vanished musical worlds of postcolonial Calcutta. Drawing on a vast array of official and personal archives alongside field interviews, his multisensorial and multilingual doctoral project excavates the musical interflows between the Anglophone and vernacular spaces that inhabited the metropolis.

To this end, Arka is investigating how imperial entertainment, postcolonial Anglophone ensemble networks, popular music in print, and tropes of performative salaciousness and censorship impacted the musical tastes of twentieth-century cosmopolitan Calcutta. Following three years of digging out Calcutta’s lost sonic architectures, he is now in the final stages of writing up.  

In 2025, Arka was awarded the SOAS Early Career Learning and Teaching Prize in the category of "Improved Student Experience" for his contributions to pedagogy and academic support within the SOAS community. He was also among a handful of ethnomusicologists globally invited to participate in the 15th International Doctoral Workshop in Ethnomusicology, hosted by the Centre for World Music (CWM), at Stiftung Universität Hildesheim and Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media (HMTMH) in June, 2025. In April 2026, his research featured globally as a long-form byline on the BBC World News Culture section.

On the performative side, Arka is an accomplished singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. A television artiste specialising in Bangla ādhunik-gān, he trained under the tutelage of Pt. Jayanta Sarkar, and is currently developing his knowledge of Hindustani ragas under Dr Budhaditya Bhattacharyya, a disciple of Pt. Ajoy Chakrabarty. His recent performances include prestigious venues such as the Durham Oriental Museum (2022) and the Old Bailey, London (2023).

• BBC Article: He made jazz under air raids - and built an Indian city's music scene

• Music History
• Popular Music
• South Asian Studies
• Ethnomusicology