The Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) is a non-profit, pedagogical and research para-academy. Founded in 2019, we promote critical thinking, teaching, research methods, reading, and writing in the humanities and social sciences, overlooked or beyond the scope of existing ‘university discourse’.

BICAR tunes its curriculum to critical philosophy, visual culture, architecture, sound, the performing arts, and design, producing a relationship between intellectual inquiry and social, political, and aesthetic transformation. In light of its location in Bombay and India, we create an environment for collective analysis and response to the contradictions of modernity and contemporaneity under conditions of global capital.

Our alumni have received admissions to universities in India and abroad for BAs (e.g. Columbia University in New York), MPhils (e.g. Goldsmith’s), MAs (e.g. Oxford), MFAs (e.g. Bard), and PhDs (e.g. IIT Bombay), as well as grants (e.g. destination university grants), fellowships (e.g. Inlaks Shivdasani Scholarship), and residencies (e.g. Kochi Biennial) to fund their academic and creative work.

People

Sonali Bhagchandani holds an MA in History from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research explores the intersections of narrative strategy, emotion, and memory through the material history that consolidates ‘postcolonial’ India. Sonali obtained a BA in English Literature from St. Xavier’s College in 2016 and a diploma in Modern & Contemporary Indian Art and Curatorial Studies from the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, in 2017.

Rico Franses is Chair of the Critical Analysis of Art at BICAR. He was for many years Founding Director of the University Art Galleries and Collections at the American University of Beirut. He has also held teaching positions at The Australian National University (Canberra), Pratt Institute (New York), and a fellowship at Harvard University. He has a BA in Philosophy (McGill University, Montreal), an MA in Art History (McGill) and a PhD in Art History (Courtauld Institute of Art, London). Among his publications are a book, Donor Portraits in Byzantine Art. On the Vicissitudes of Contact between Human and Divine (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and several articles including ‘Lacan and Byzantium. In the Beginning was the Image’, ‘The Deleuzian Spatiality of Byzantine Art’, and “Untime in the Unconscious. On the Dislocations of Time in Freud, Lacan, Laurie Anderson and Walid Sadek’.

Rohit Goel is Director/Professor of the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). He is the editor of Future Perfect: Catastrophe and Redemption in the Contemporary (Kaph 2023) and the co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics (Bloomsbury 2019). Rohit has taught courses in critical theory, historiography, and politics at the University of Chicago, Sciences Po Paris, the American University of Beirut, and Jnanapravaha Mumbai. He received the Fulbright IIE and Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellowships to pursue years of Arabic language study in Syria and was awarded the Fulbright DDRA and Andrew C. Mellon Fellowship for PhD dissertation research in primary sources in Lebanon. He completed his BA from Harvard College and, as Harvard University’s Paul Williams Fellow to Emmanuel College, was granted an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge.

Amita Kini-Singh is Professor/Director of BICAR Write and a cross-cultural theorist specialising in the artistic connections between India and Japan. She has developed and taught courses in art history and academic writing at BICAR, the Cathedral and John Connon School, and Jnanapravaha Mumbai. Some of her recent publications include ‘Japanese Inspiration in the Art of Nandalal Bose’, ‘From Anthropology to Artistic Practice: How Bricolage Has Been Used in the Twentieth Century as an Ideal Model of Engagement with the World’ and ‘Indian Textiles in Japan: Using the Historic Past to Define Future Strategy’. With a BSc in Computer Science, an MBA in Marketing, and a PhD in Art History, she takes an inter-disciplinary view in the design and facilitation of BICAR’s academic writing programmes.

Rutwij Nakhwa is pursuing an MA+PhD in Philosophy at IIT Bombay. Since 2018, he has taught courses and conducted guest lectures at the Mass Media Department of St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. For years, Rutwij worked in India’s film festival circuit as a journalist and in curation, subtitling, casting, and layout design, and has written on cinema for The Hindu. He holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Critical Theory, Aesthetics, and Practice from Jnanapravaha Mumbai (2018) and a Bachelor’s in Mass Media (Journalism) with Honours from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai (2017).

Pahul Singh is the Director of Design at the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). She holds a BFA in Painting from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan in 2019, and an MVA in Painting from MS University of Baroda in 2021.

BICAR in Lebanon

International Consortium of Critical Theory Program

421, Abu Dhabi

Collaboration

BICAR is committed to collaborating with para-academic institutes in India and abroad. We share knowledge, methods, experiences, and experiment with new pedagogical approaches to delivering and exhibiting challenging material to students who lack foundational knowledge of a topic but must traverse an establishment world of academe. Currently, we work with three forums:

W421

History

BICAR in India grows out of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research, which was founded in Lebanon in 2014 by Professors Nadia Bou Ali, Raymond Brassier, Octavian Esanu, Rohit Goel, Angela Harutyunyan, Sami Khatib, and Ghalya Saadawi, a group of philosophers, historians, sociologists, and artists committed to critical analysis and research outside the strictures of an increasingly corporatized, global academe.

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