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.
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, 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 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
I am working 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 three 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.
UG Sem 1: SOCLC2: 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: SOCLC4: Sociology of India 1: This course introduces the processes and modes of construction of knowledge of India. Further, it aims to draw attention to the key concepts and institutions which are useful for the understanding of Indian society.
PG Sem 2: SOCL 0801: Philosophy and the Social Sciences: This course discusses relationships between ethnographic research and philosophical traditions, looking simultaneously at select texts of Descartes, Hume, Kant, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and contemporary works of 'philosophical anthropology'.
PG Sem 3: SOCL 0903: Subject and Method: This course discusses 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, Derrida, and Deleuze-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: Philadelphia, 2021)
Series: Intellectual History of the Modern Age
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).
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.
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.
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://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://jhiblog.org/2022/08/12/political-economy-liberalism-and-foucault-an-interview-with-upal-chakrabarti-part-2/
Presidency University Students Corner