My interests range over intellectual history, colonialism, political economy, agrarian studies, science studies, and governance. My doctoral work consisted of historical investigations into connections between political economy, science, agrarian governance, and regional property configurations in British India and imperial Britain in the nineteenth century. In the book, developed out of this work, I argue that the “local” needs to be understood as a conceptual formation generating, as concrete effects, entanglements between spatializable locales and non-localizable spaces.
I am starting some new work on practices of science in twentieth century India.
B.A. Sociology (Presidency College, Calcutta, 2005)
M.A. Sociology (JNU, New Delhi, 2007)
PhD History (SOAS, London, 2013)
Qualified UGC Net for Lectureship in 2010
I completed my B.A. in Sociology from Presidency College, Calcutta in 2005, following which I joined the M.A. program in Sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, which I completed in 2007. At JNU, I also opted for a number of courses on Indian history and historical methodology at the Centre for Historical Studies. In 2008, I secured full funding from the Felix Trust to pursue a PhD program in History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
I was selected as a Fellow at the Institute of Critical Social Inquiry, New School of Social Research, to work with Prof. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on "Why Marx Today?" (June, 2016)
At Presidency University, I worked as the coordinator of two institutional collaborations, with the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge.
In 2014 I organised a two-day conference on "Sociological Perspectives: Old and New", funded by the ICSSR.
In 2017, I co-organised a conference on "Heritage and History in South Asia" with SOAS, to celebrate the centenary-bicentenary partnership of the two institutions.
I am currently working on a Pilot Project titled 'Records of the Oldest Institution of Western Education in Asia: Archiving the Hindoo Presidency College Collection', sponsored by the Endangered Archives Program, British Library, London (Grant Amount: 13749 GBP)
https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP1230
In this semester, at the undergraduate level, I am teaching a course called 'Genealogies of the Social' where I explore histories of the concept of 'society', and a distinct form of thinking that we can call 'sociological', across multiple sites like late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe, global imperial discourses, and reformist ideas in nineteenth century South Asia .
At the postgraduate level, I am teaching a course titled 'Methodologies of the Social Sciences', where I am discussing intellectual currents which started getting articulated in Europe from the 1960s, and acted as critical methodological tools for contemporary social sciences. As part of these currents, I discuss key ideas of Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze.
As part of the Gen Ed program for the undergraduates, in the course offered by our department called 'Mechanics of the Mind', I am introducing to students from various disciplinary backgrounds (both natural and social sciences) basic ideas on the relationship between language and mind.
Monograph
Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia) (Forthcoming)
Series: Intellectual History of the Modern Age
Articles in Journals
Peer Reviewed:
'Agrarian Localities: Political economy as local power in early-nineteenth century British India', Modern Asian Studies, October 20, 2015 (Published Online), Volume 50, Issue 3, May 2016, 898-933 (In Print) .
"The Problem of Property: Local histories and political-economic categories in British India", Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2018, Volume 61, Issue 5-6, 1005-35
(Part of a double special issue on "Repossessing Property in South Asia: Land, Rights and Law Across the Early Modern/Modern Divide" eds. F. Chaudhry)
Articles in Edited Volumes
"The Work of the 'Local’" in Maitrayee Chaudhuri and Manish Thakur (ed.) Doing Theory: Locations, Hierarchies and Disjunctions, (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2018), 59-77.
‘Introduction’, co-authored with E. Rashkow & S. Ghosh, in E. Rashkow, S. Ghosh and U. Chakrabarti (eds.) Memory, Identity, and the Colonial Encounter in India: Essays in honor of Peter Robb, (New Delhi: Routledge, 2017), 1-28.
Edited Volume
E. Rashkow, S. Ghosh and U. Chakrabarti (eds.) Memory, Identity, and the Colonial Encounter in India: Essays in honor of Peter Robb, (New Delhi: Routledge, 2017).
Book Review
Arupjoti Saikia, 'A Century of Protests: Peasant Politics in Assam since 1900, (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014)’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 52, No. 1, Jan-March, 2015, 11-14.
Jayanta Sengupta, 'At the Margins: Discourses of development, democracy and regionalism in Orissa, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015)', South Asian History and Culture, Published Online: November, 2016, 108-11
Presidency University Students Corner