Associate Professor of Media Studies, Ashoka University
Ph.D. Jawaharlal Nehru UniversityChitralekha is a social anthropologist who has employed ethnography in diverse sites of caste, class, and ethnic marginalization in India. Her work advances understandings of particularities to constitutions of difference, and the ways in which they may be negotiated over time and place. Her first book, a monograph based on her doctoral thesis, supported by the Nehru Memorial Fund, was an account of lived histories of mobilization to armed violence in domains seen as deeply disparate in academic discourse (Ordinary people, Extraordinary Violence: Naxalites and Hindu Rioters in India, Routledge, 2012 [South Asia Edition 2018]). Located from the standpoint of the foot soldier, and based on extensive fieldwork with Naxalite armed cadre and later, perpetrators of the 2002 violence against Muslims in Gujarat, it was concerned with understanding of not just the formalized ideological contexts to left radical and ethnic mobilization in India, but also the local histories, mediatic habitus, and idea-structures within which ordinary people may be mobilized to collaborate in projects of violence. Her work has since been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Current Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Public History Review, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Economic and Political Weekly; and in several edited volumes.
She is presently completing a book project, Reflexive Radicalism, an ethnographic examination of student protest in the Kashmir valley between 2011-2017. In continuity with anthropological examinations of militarization and its production of social suffering for particular communities, as well as of forms of social action and meaning making in virtual worlds, her work renders visible the constitutive becomings of the dreamwork of `freedom’ and `terror’ that tear at powered discursive circulations that currently appropriate both. In doing so, it helps us think about what `digitality’ might mean in a state of exception. This project was supported by the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, where she was Member (2017-18) and Visitor (2018-19). Chitralekha is working on two additional book projects. The first, thinking with Gadamerian hermeneutics, engages with prospects of `understanding’ in anthropology of violence. She began this project at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, as part of a workshop on Philosophy and Ethnographic Practice, curated for the theme Seminar, School of Social Science, and had the opportunity to think further in collaboration with a year-long seminar on Debt (2020-21) with the Committee for Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Centre, CUNY. A major essay, discussing the arguments at its heart, is forthcoming in Current Anthropology. The second project in progress traces a public history of the mediatized region of Pulwama in south Kashmir.
Chitralekha was formerly faculty at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi (2012-23), and Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai (2010-11). Her present teaching and advising interests are with the complex, historically located, yet indeterminate relationships between culture, technology, and inequity.
Books (Peer reviewed)
Journal Articles (Peer reviewed)
Book Chapters (Peer Reviewed)
Policy Reports
Numerous writings in newsmagazines/ English dailies in India from 1997 onwards. Cover and lead stories in Sunday (Ananda Bazar Patrika Group) on urgent social and political issues of the time, including documentation of (then virtually unheard) perspectives of lesbian women in India, the unacknowledged depression epidemic, investigations into public healthcare and medical negligence.Several short films with Living on the Edge, India’s longest running environment and social issues program, on subjects such as the left insurgency in Jharkhand and Bihar, displacement of adivasis from forested lands, hazardous medical practice in rural and small-town India, diverse environment and wildlife conservation issues. Edit page columns in Hindustan Times, Times of India (Crest Edition), The Conversation, Huffington Post etc.
Select examples:
Story. Sunday, Delhi. Vol. 24, 27 July-2 August, pp. 32-40.
Select Invited Talks
Select Workshop Papers
Awards/ Fellowships
2017-2018. Member, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
2004-2006. Jawaharlal Nehru Scholarship for Doctoral Studies, Nehru Memorial Fund, New Delhi.
1993-1994. Merit Scholarship, Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi.
Visitorships
2021-2022. Visiting Fellow. Borders Seminar (Remote), Committee for Globalization and Social Change (CGSC), Graduate Centre, City University of New York (CUNY), New York.
2020-2021. Visiting Fellow. Debt Seminar (Remote), Committee for Globalization and Social Change (CGSC), Graduate Centre, City University of New York (CUNY), New York.
2018-2019. Visitor, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Courses, 2024
PhD Awarded, Primary Advisor
MPhil. Awarded, Primary Advisor,