Basil Bastaki

Basil Bastaki is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Yale. He is currently researching the origins of political parties in the colonial province of Assam (India), particularly how different types of elites decided to cooperate with one another. He is excited to visit the archives in New Delhi and interact with the students and professors at JNU. Previously, Basil studied Assamese and Bengali through the American Institute of Indian Studies (in partnership with Gauhati University), allowing him to live in Guwahati and Kolkata for two years. Before Yale, Basil was an MA student at the University of Chicago's Committee on International Relations and a BSFS student at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.