Research Areas | Department of History
Dr Maanvender Singh
"My research interrogates the judicial and constitutional epistemology of caste and carelessness before the implementation of the Mandal Commission Report, 1990. It also engages with the historical and philosophical foundation of the political discourse on caste and classlessness by locating a critique of modern-secular political discourse, which created a vital space for making wide-reaching claims over the idea of citizenship, equality, and justice. One of the key focus areas of my work is how the law operates as a discursive practice and as a text, where the legal application of logic is grounded in socially constructed narratives."
Dr Megha Yadav
"My research delves into the dynamics of religious processes during the Early Medieval Period of Indian History. Specifically, it explores the evolution of Buddhism through an examination of its textual and visual landscapes. Thereby, enquiring into the complexities of religious boundaries, interactions, exchanges, assimilations, and conflicts. A significant aspect of these inquiries is the scrutiny of gender relations, both in terms of societal practices and within mythological narratives.
Furthermore, the investigation extends to the formation of Tibetan Buddhism, probing into the methods of transmission, modes of acceptance, and the interactive processes between Buddhists and non-Buddhist Tibetan traditions."
Dr Lekshmi Chandran
"My area of specialisation is the social history of pre-colonial Kerala (which includes certain parts of the present-day state of Tamilnadu). The focus is on the everyday lives of the people in the region during pre-colonial times, to be specific familial relationships and the structure of households, both patrilineal and matrilineal. Thereby understanding the gender relations in society, how these are represented in the literary traditions, and the transformation and continuity of social institutions such as kinship and marriage practices in the region between the 9th to 17th Centuries."
Dr Aqsa Agha
"I have worked on the larger process of political transition in Eighteenth-Century India, with an emphasis on legitimacy, political culture, and gender relations in the state of Awadh. I have explored the harem as a crucible for a political transition in Awadh. Besides teaching and researching history, I am also interested in community engagement, observing, analysing and documenting processes at the grassroots using the Participatory Research method. My broader research interest lies in historical processes and their impact on the social locations of class, caste, and gender."
Dr Manaswini Sen
"My research focuses on the history of modern South and Southeast Asia from the
perspective of Global Intellectual History. By delving into the nuances of popular trade
union politics in late colonial India, the cardinal objective is to devise possible heuristic
methods in doing "Intellectual History from Below." It is an endeavor to trace the changing trajectories of decolonial epistemological traditions of the Global South. My other research interests straddle the fields of Labor History, History of Empire, Urban History,Transcontinental History, the Indian Ocean World, and the History of Surveillance. Given my ancillary discursive interests in literature and philosophy, I have adopted an interdisciplinary approach to both teaching and researching history. In extension, my research is located in the intersection and interstices of class, caste, community, religion, and gender. Hence, my goal is to assess the contemporary institutions of governance and control of the Global South in the light of the imperial past, aiding in better contextualization and comprehension of the present predicaments."
Know Them in Detail!
- Dr Maanvender Singh specializes in Modern Indian History and his academic pursuits are centred on exploring the area of caste and modernity, interrogating the judicial and constitutional epistemology of caste. He is currently working on the area of global urbanism in India. He was also a Public Policy Scholar at the Hindu Centre for Public Policy, Chennai. He teaches courses in Modern Indian History; Society, Polity and Economy of India after Independence; Understanding the Indian Constitution; European History; Colonial Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, among others
- Dr Megha Yadav specialises in Ancient Indian History. Her research interests include the history of South Asian religions, Ancient and Early Medieval Art traditions in the Indian Subcontinent, the making of religious mythology and its relation with popular social practices. She has also received Humboldt fellowship from the Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study, inherit. Heritage in Transformation, Humboldt Universität Zu Berlin, Germany, starting from Oct 2024.
- Dr Lekshmi Chandran CP specialises in Ancient Indian History and her primary area of research is the social history of Pre-Colonial Kerala, her areas of interest are the everyday lives of the people; matrilineal inheritance in pre-colonial Kerala, gender relations, and caste oppression. Her paper titled The Matrilineal Households Within the Brahmanical Social Order in Pre-Colonial Kerala: A Study of Maṇipravāḷaṃ Literary Sources from 13th - 15th Centuries’ won the Dr Nasreen Ahmad Memorial Prize for the Best Paper in Gender History, presented in Indian History Congress 78th Session
- Dr Aqsa Agha specialises in Medieval Indian history. She has worked on gender, state, legitimacy, and political transition in eighteenth-century India. Besides her interest in history, she has been associated as a Researcher, with organisations in the field of human rights, social justice and participatory research bringing community perspectives central to research, including HRDA-India, TISS Mumbai, Centre for Equity Studies, and Praxis Institute of Participatory Research.
- Dr Manaswini Sen specialises in Modern Indian History Her research interests straddle the fields of Global History, Labour History in South and Southeast Asia, History of Empire, Intellectual History, and History of Surveillance. She received Charles Wallace India Trust (CWIT) Short Research Grant 2022-23, towards archival research in the UK. She is also the recipient of Asian Graduate Student Fellowship (AGSF) fellow at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 2022 and the Royal Historical Society (RHS) London Postgraduate Fellow.
- Dr Robert Rahman Raman specialises in Modern Indian History, Labour History, Urban Studies and Socio-political movements, with expertise in the history of Bombay’s mill workers. In their PhD at the University of Göttingen, Germany, he looked at the popular politics of Bombay’s erstwhile mill district, popularly known as Girangaon, in the first half of the twentieth century. Dr Robert’s current research project, developed during his postdoc, explores the plurality of historical experiences, including class-based mobilisation and a united anti-British popular upsurge in post-war Bombay, to underline the existence of alternate possibilities of popular mobilisation besides communal polarisation at this historical conjuncture.
