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Visiting Professor of History, Ashoka University
Ph.D. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New DelhiBefore joining as a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University, Neeladri Bhattacharya taught at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (1976-2017). He studied in Cambridge School, St. Stephen’s College, and Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has been an Agatha Harrison Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and has held visiting appointments in Europe, South Africa and the United States.
Bhattacharya’s research and publications have been on the making of the colonial rural order, on custom, law and colonialism, on colonial power and discourse, and on history and theory. His recent publications include: The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World, Permanent Black, 2018, SUNY 2019; with Ramin Jahanbegloo and Romila Thapar, Talking History: Conversations with Romila Thapar, OUP 2017; co-edited with Joy Pachuau, Landscape, Culture and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India, CUP, 2018.
Bhattacharya has been co-editor of the book series Themes in Indian History (Oxford University Press) and the journal Studies in History (Sage), and editor of Tracts for the Times (Orient Longman) – a series on issues of contemporary concern. He was Chief Advisor of the NCERT history text-books for schools, produced between 2005-08.
Currently he is working on a book on law, violence and the cultural politics of colonial governance, and another one on the embedded histories of cultural objects focussing on the Koh-i-Noor.
Books:
1. Essays on the Commercialization of Indian Agriculture, edited with K.N. Raj, Sumit Guha, et al, OUP, 1986.
2. Labouring Histories: Agrarian Labour and Colonialism, VV Giri Institute, 2004.
3. The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Making of a Colonial Rural Order, Permanent Black.
4. Talking History: Conversations with Romila Thapar, with Ramin Jahanbegloo and Romila Thapar, OUP 2017.
5. Landscape, Culture and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India, co-edited with Joy Pachuau, CUP, 2018.
6. JNU Stories, edited with Kunal Chakrabarti, Janaki Nair et al., Aleph, 2021.
Edited Special Issues of Journals:
1. Forests, Fields and Pastures, Sage, 1998. Edited, Special issue of Studies in History.
2. Rewriting History, Special Issue of Seminar, February 2003.
Some select essays:
1. ‘The Logic of Tenancy Cultivation’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 1983.
2. ‘Lenders and Debtors’, Studies in History, 1983; reproduced in Sugata Bose ed., Credits, Markets and the Agrarian Economy of Colonial India, OUP, 1994.
3. ‘Colonial State and Agrarian society’ in Romila Thapar ed. Situating Indian History, OUP, 1986; reproduced in Burton Stein, ed., The Making of Agrarian Policies in British India, 1770-1900, OUP, 1992.
4. ‘Agricultural Labour and Production: Central and South East Punjab, 1870-1940’, in Bhattacharya, K.N. Raj eds., Essays in the Commercialization of Indian Agriculture, OUP, 1986; reproduced in Gyan Prakash ed., The World of the Rural Labourer in Colonial India, 1992.
5. ‘Myth, History and the Politics of Ramjanmabhumi’, in S Gopal ed., An Anatomy of a Confrontation, Penguin, 1993.
6. ‘Pastoralists in a Colonial World’, in Ramchandra Guha and David Arnold eds. Nature, Culture and Imperialism, OUP, 1996.
7. ‘Remaking Custom: Discourses and Practices of Colonial Codification’, in S Gopal and R Champakalakshmi eds. Tradition, Ideology and Dissent, OUP, 1996.
8. ‘Predicaments of Mobility: Peddlers in Colonial Markets’, in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Claude Markovits and Jacques Pouchepadass eds. Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750-1950, Permanent Black, 2003.
9. ‘Notes Towards a Conception of the Colonial Public’, in. Civil Society, Public Sphere, and Citizenship: Dialogues and Perceptions. ed. Rajeev Bhargava. sage publications. 2005, pages 130-156.
10. ‘Predicaments of Secular Histories’, Bain Attwood, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Claude Lominaz ed., Public Culture, Duke, 2008.
11. ‘Teaching History in Schools: The Politics of Textbooks in India,’ History Workshop Journal, 67, Spring 2009.
12. ‘Some Reflections on “Life after Thirty”, African Studies, Vol. 69, Issue 10, 2010.
13. ‘Irony and the Writing of History’, in Sumit Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, Permanent Black, 2010.
14. ‘Lineages of Capital’, Historical Materialism, 21:4, 2013.
15. ‘Promise of Modernity, Antinomies of Development: Canal Colonies of Punjab, 1890-1940’, in Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik eds., Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, Tulika Books 2017.
16. ‘Violence and the Languages of Law,’ Aparna Balachandran, Bhavani Raman et al eds. Iterations of Law, OUP, 2018.
17. ‘Memory, History and the Politics of the Hindu Right’ in Niels F. May and Thomas Msaisson eds,, Niels F. May and Thomas Maisson eds,., National History and New Nationalisms in the Twentieth Century: A Global Comparison, Routledge, 2021. A revised version is published in Berber Bevernage, et. al. eds, Claiming the People’s Past, Cambridge, 2024.
18. ‘Pastoralism and Sedentarisation’, in Mrinalini Sinha, Prasannan Parthasarathy, and David Gilmartin eds., Cambridge History on the Modern Indian Subcontinent, Vol. I, Cambridge (forthcoming).
Agatha Harrison Fellow, Oxford University
At Ashoka: Reading History, Great Books, Colonial Power
At JNU: Agrarian Histories, Capitalism and Colonialism, Colonial Policies, Historical Method
