A Bengali from the district of Hooghly in West Bengal by birth, Professor Srikanta Chatterjee is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Economics and Finance of Massey University in New Zealand. A Ph. D. from the London School of Economics, Professor Chatterjee has lived and worked in Australia, India, Japan, Fiji and the U.K. and held visiting positions in a number of other countries, most recently in China, Japan and Germany. He has been awarded the Fulbright Travelling Fellowship, twice, to attend conferences and visit and speak at universities in the USA. His areas of academic specialisation are international trade and finance, taxation, income distribution and inequality, the NZ economy and the comparative performance of the Indian and Chinese economies. Now, in his retirement, Professor Chatterjee has been able to return to his “first love”, Bengali history, literature and culture. He has been reading widely in these areas and writing, as an amateur, essays on subjects including the lives and works of eminent Bengalis. His essays have included Rabindranath Tagore, Najrul Islam, Ashutosh Mukherjee, Dwijendralal Roy, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Chaitanya. He is currently working on the life and works of the Bengali polymath Acharya Brajendranath Seal.In 2016, several Japanese universities celebrated the centenary of Rabindranath’s first visit to japan. As part of these celebrations, Professor Chatterjee was invited to speak at Sophia University and Tokyo University in Japan. He spoke on Tagore’s thinking and practice in the areas of education and rural reconstruction and how he was influenced by Japan in these areas.
