Debanjan Chakrabarti

Debanjan Chakrabarti is Director, British Council, East and Northeast India, and was the UK’s in-post lead for the culture track of G20 in 2023. He is a co-supervisor for the Oxford-Cambridge-Open University Collaborative Doctoral Award on ‘Multilingual teaching, learning and assessment of English in India’s primary schools,’ which is a partnership with the British Council. He has a background in research, especially in public policy, and has scoped and scouted two landmark research projects for the British Council – The Creative Economy Mapping of Durga Puja in West Bengal on behalf of the state government of West Bengal in India and a Cambridge University-led project on multilingualism  in Indian primary schools. A triple gold medallist in English literature from Jadavpur University, India, he has a multidisciplinary PhD, combining literature, films and media studies, from the University of Reading, UK, for which he received a Felix Scholarship from India. He started his career as a journalist with The Telegraph and then taught literature, culture and films at Visva Bharati University in India and in the UK early in his career. He has a number of scholarly and journalistic publications to his name. He retains an active interest in sports, especially tennis and cricket, and often writes and speaks on related topics for media publications and literature festivals.