My interests range over intellectual history, colonialism, political economy, agrarian studies, science studies, and governance. In my doctoral work, I examined connections between political economy, science, agrarian governance, and regional property configurations in British India and imperial Britain in the nineteenth century. In my 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.
At present I am working on the history of Hindu/Presidency College, the first institution of western education in Asia, established in 1817. I am examining micro-practices of institutionality, pedagogy, disciplinarity, scientific practice, and governance in relation to questions of empire, nation, science and reform. My earlier interest in the problem of scale continues to inform this work.
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, joined the PhD program in History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, with a Felix scholarship.
I was selected as a Fellow at the Institute of Critical Social Inquiry, New School of Social Research, to work with 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 worked 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) 2019-2020
https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP1230
I worked as Co-Investigator with Sukanya Sarbadhikary (Presidency University) and Rochona Majumdar (University of Chicago) on a project titled 'Hindu/Presidency College: A Global History'. The project has received four years of funding from the UChicaco Global Provost's Faculty Awards. The project is preparing a website-cum-database of institutional records of the Hindu/Presidency College, and a collection of essays on the global histories of intellectual production in the College. (2020-2024)
Administrative Work
Teachers' Representative, Faculty Council: 2018-present
Member, Anti-Ragging Squad: 2019-2023
UG Sem 1: Introduction to Sociology 2: This course explores 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.
UG Sem 2: Sociology of India 1: This course introduces students to the major historiographic perspectives on colonialism and Indian society in the nineteenth century. It discusses colonial genealogies of significant social categories in India, like 'peasant', 'merchant', 'caste', 'tribe', and 'women'.
PG Sem 4: Philosophy and the Social Sciences: This course examines relationships between ethnographic research and philosophical traditions, discussing simultaneously select texts of Rene Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and contemporary works of 'philosophical anthropology'.
PG Sem 3: Subject and Method: This course discusses some intellectual currents articulated in Europe from the 1960s, which subsequently engendered impactful methodological tools for contemporary social sciences. As part of these currents, I discuss key ideas of Ferdinand Saussure, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze- Felix Guattari.
Ongoing:
Sandipan Mitra, Anthropology and Governance in Modern India
Anirban Saha, Bengali Sweets: Ethnographic Explorations of Market, Consumption and Taste
Thondup Gyatsho Amdo Bhutia, Ethnic Identities in Borderlands: The Bhutias of Darjeeling and Kalimpong
Monograph
Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
Series: Intellectual History of the Modern Age
Edited Volume
Ezra Rashkow, Sanjukta Ghosh and Upal Chakrabarti (eds.) Memory, Identity, and the Colonial Encounter in India: Essays in honor of Peter Robb (Routledge, 2017).
Rochona Majumdar, Sukanya Sarbadhikary and Upal Chakrabarti (eds.) The Hindu/Presidency College: Excellence and Exclusion (Cambridge University Press, 2025) (Forthcoming)
Articles in Journals
'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, Volume 61, Issue 5-6, 2018, 1005-35
'Textualizing the agrarian: plots and forms in British India', South Asian History and Culture, Volume 14, Issue 4, 2023, 423-36. Published online: 15 May, 2022.
“Facts” and “Ideas”: Richard Jones, William Whewell, and the Entangled Histories of Science and Political Economy in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain, Journal of the History of Ideas, 85: 3, July 2024, 509-37.
'Bhakti, Equality, and Power: Temple Potters and Sacred Food (Mahaprasada) in Orissa', Journal of Social History, Published Online: 29 July, 2024.
Book Chapters
Chakrabarti, Upal. "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.
Chakrabarti, Upal. "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.
Chakrabarti, Upal. "Introduction: A Liberal Arts College in a Colonial Milieu", co-authored with Rochona Majumdar and Sukanya Sarbadhikary in Rochona Majumdar, Sukanya Sarbadhikary and Upal Chakrabarti (eds.) The Hindu/Presidency College: Excellence and Exclusion (Cambridge University Press, 2025) (Forthcoming)
Chakrabarti, Upal. "The Multi-Institutional Form of the Presidency College" in Rochona Majumdar, Sukanya Sarbadhikary and Upal Chakrabarti (eds.) The Hindu/Presidency College: Excellence and Exclusion (Cambridge University Press, 2025) (Forthcoming)
Chakrabarti, Upal and Sukanya Sarbadhikary. "J.C. Bose's hand-machines: Instrumentation as the transcendence of limits in Presidency College" in Rochona Majumdar, Sukanya Sarbadhikary and Upal Chakrabarti (eds.) The Hindu/Presidency College: Excellence and Exclusion (Cambridge University Press, 2025) (Forthcoming)
Bibliographic Essay
“East India Company and Hinduism.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Hinduism. Ed. Tracy Coleman. (New York: Oxford University Press), Published online: 25.09.2023.
Book Reviews
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
Interview:
Re-thinking Agrarian and Intellectual Histories of South Asia: An Interview with Upal Chakrabarti (Part 1), Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, by Osama Siddiqui
https://www.jhiblog.org/2022/08/03/re-thinking-agrarian-and-intellectual-histories-of-south-asia-an-interview-with-upal-chakrabarti-part-1/
Political Economy, Liberalism, and Foucault: An Interview with Upal Chakrabarti (Part 2), Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, by Osama Siddiqui
https://www.jhiblog.org/2022/08/12/political-economy-liberalism-and-foucault-an-interview-with-upal-chakrabarti-part-2/
Book interview by Arighna Gupta (University of Michigan) at the New Books Network
https://newbooksnetwork.com/assembling-the-local
Presidency University Students Corner