Indrani Chatterjee
Biographic Data
| ID | 181653 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Indrani Chatterjee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Indrani |
| FAMILY NAME | Chatterjee |
| SIGNATURE | CHATTERJEE I |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9610-5354 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 159 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The Mughal Northeast
The chapter offers a view of premodern eastern and northeastern India beyond the statist and nationalist frames of twentieth-century historiography. It describes a geographically dispersed and layered form of governance that linked premodern eastern and northeastern India to regions further to the west. This form was monastic governmentality, a form in which the authority of the heads of the monastic lineages prevailed over the households and res…
Haunting the Historiography of Slaves in South Asia from the nineteenth century to the present
Using both English and Urdu‐language records, this article traces the career of a few African and Afro‐Asian women slaves in the household‐state of Awadh during the first half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the same records, this article compares a master‐poet's recognition of the motherhood of the African and Afro‐Asian slaves to the treatment of other slave‐mothers. It then moves to analyse British official necropolitics towards the eld…
Epistemic Justice and the University: Reclaiming the Academy for Emancipatory Urban Praxis
This essay offers provocations on the possibilities and challenges of advancing ‘epistemic justice’ in urban research, with particular care for the growing ‘academic precariat’. We explore some of the institutional barriers and possibilities of doing collaborative justice‐oriented work within urban and built environment scholarship, especially for those fixed‐term, early career, casual academics, independent scholars or those with career breaks. …
Building climate resilience through energy access? An empirical study on grid connectivity in the Indian Sundarbans
Scholarly debates on energy and climate change have successfully foregrounded mitigation measures, but often overlook the role of energy in climate adaptation. Adaptation is of key importance to building resilience to climate change impacts, but its link with energy access has not been studied in detail. This study aims to address this research gap by examining the relation between electricity access and climate resilience in the context of Bally…
Revisualizing Slavery: Visual Sources on Slavery in the Indonesian Archipelago and Indian Ocean
Composed of fourteen short chapters arranged thematically rather than chronologically, this is a significant, and broadly useful, attempt to read Dutch visual art from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century for “Asian” slave-servants. The art-evidence appears to negate the legal orders prohibiting slaveholding inside the Netherlands. Such legislation did not extend to the Dutch colonies from 1621 onward. Slaves acquired by Dutchmen and…
The 1619 Project Forum
Why has the American Historical Review commissioned nineteen scholars to review the 1619 Project? There is no precedent in the history of the journal for a review forum of this scope and magnitude. Without question, the 1619 Project has become a very public flash point within academic and public debates centered on the work history does in the world. Its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize for her lead essay that opened the project…
No city for Khori Gaon residents: Forced eviction during a pandemic in the name of forest conservation
In the last decade, conservation-led displacements have intensified in India’s peri-urban areas, especially in the Delhi NCR (National Capital Region). While global academic discourses on urban informality and poverty have transcended the hegemonic ways of thinking about informal settlements as a lack of development, within the legal and public domains in India, the debates that informal settlement residents are ‘free-loaders,’ ‘encroachers’ and …
Rising inequalities, deepening divides: Urban citizenship in the time of Covid-19
As governments around the globe navigate the effects of COVID-19 crisis, the urban poor endure the unevenly distributed socio-economic impacts of the pandemic. This burden is more pronounced in Global South megacities, where millions of people engage in precarious informal employment. We examine how the urban poor in Delhi (India), Dhaka (Bangladesh), and Manila (Philippines) have been disproportionately affected by the crisis. A cross-case analy…
When Sun Meets Moon: Gender, Eros and Ecstasy in Urdu Poetry, written by Kugle, Scott
Kugle, Scott. When Sun Meets Moon: Gender, Eros and Ecstasy in Urdu Poetry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 348 pp.; $34.95.Ever since Foucault claimed that Western European medical and psychoanalytical discourses generated a “science of sexuality” (scientia sexualis) while the non-West remained the domain of ars erotica, historians of the non-West have sought to place premodern Arab-Islamic, Persianate and regional South A…
Whose History? What Theory
Kleinberg, Scott, and Wilder’s call for a closer relationship between critical thinking and history writing (iii.1–iii.10) so closely resonates with my own training in postcolonial Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru Universities in India that I feel impelled to engage the essayists even though the audiences the authors address are very different from mine.Let me begin with a caveat. The contextualization that the essayists distance themselves from is per…
Informal settlement is not a euphemism for ‘slum’: What’s at stake beyond the language
Everybody knows that the phrase ‘informal settlement’ is a widely used euphemism for ‘slum’, avoiding a word that can be seen to cast a stigma on neighbourhoods of the urban poor. Yet we have also long known that ‘informal settlement’ is a verb – identifying self-organised modes of production through which the urban poor produce affordable housing and urban infrastructure. Here we argue four key points. First, the distinction between slums and in…
Towards a morphogenesis of informal settlements
Informal settlement is the most pervasive mode of urbanization throughout cities of the global South, yet little is known of how informal urban design works as a production of urban space. This paper maps the emergence and transformation of street/laneway networks and buildings in a broad range of settlements. While such data cannot reveal the social, economic and political complexity of individual cases, it demonstrates the range of informal mor…
Heroic Shāktism: The Cult of Durgā in Ancient Indian Kingship, by Bihani Sarkar
Since the early twentieth century there have been three broad trends in the study of Indic goddesses. The first was shaped by evolutionary philosophy and anthropology in holding that societies grew from ‘mother-right’ in their primitive stages to those which upheld ‘father-right’. This tradition, represented by scholars such as Ramaprasad Chanda (1916) and N.N. Bhattacharya (1971, 1977), studied Sanskritic texts such as the Veda and Purana for th…
ABO and Rhesus Blood Groups: A Study among the Lodhas of Paschim Medinipur, West Bengal
Connected Histories and the Dream of Decolonial History
This essay argues that historians in post-colonial nation-states and spaces cannot offer connected histories across spaces shaped by war and the partitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It provides examples of these hurdles from a space called ‘Assam’ in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial archive. Native scribes collaborated with colonial Britons in writing accounts that set up spaces as culturally separate and disconnect…
Afro-Asian Capital and Its Dissolution
This essay argues that a convergence of global and postcolonial scholarship has led to a dominant mode of reading precolonial records in ways that are colonial in their perspective and political purpose. It traces this dominance between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. The first section contains a historically specific discussion of wealth-in-people to situate Afro-Asians in the subcontinent. The second outlines two Mughal historians o…
Ādivāsīs, tribes and other neologisms for erasing precolonial pasts: An example from Northeast India
This essay engages Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sumit Guha and James C. Scott by arguing that all of them overlook a historically well-evidenced set of subject positions and concepts of space. This was monastic governmentality. Lay and ordained populations attached to monastic teachers and lineages moved and interacted across a vast network of societies till the eighteenth century. The arrival of colonial European armies in the terrain marked by monastic …
Women, Monastic Commerce, and Coverture in Eastern India circa 1600–1800 CE
This article argues that economic histories of the transition to colonial economics in the eighteenth century have overlooked the infrastructural investments that wives and widows made in networks of monastic commerce. Illustrative examples from late eighteenth-century records suggest that these networks competed with the commercial networks operated by private traders serving the English East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. T…
Monastic ‘Governmentality: Revisiting ‘Community’ and ‘Communalism’ in South Asia
This essay extends and revises the Foucauldian concept of ‘governmentality’ in order to root theories about the ‘political community’ in the historical evidence available from the Indian subcontinent. It uses this revised understanding as a frame for rethinking issues of violence between identical communities relevant to understanding the violence of 1947‐1971. Such violence, the essay argues, was not tied to the inherent nature of any one commun…
Conclusion
The chapter summarises the century long processes that resulted in the growth of ethnology under military aegis in the colony, and especially traces the ways in which such ethnology rests on the physical obliteration of monastic subjects in the northeast Indian regions in the early twentieth century. After 1947, eminent historians of India used the same colonial language to write about populations in northeast India as though they shared nothing …
Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India
Monastic Governmentality, Colonial Misogyny, and Postcolonial Amnesia in South Asia
Research Article| April 01 2013 Monastic Governmentality, Colonial Misogyny, and Postcolonial Amnesia in South Asia Indrani Chatterjee Indrani Chatterjee Indrani Chatterjee is currently Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and will join the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. She is the author of Gender, Slavery and the Law in Colonial India (1999), Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages …
When "Sexuality" Floated Free of Histories in South Asia
From the 1960s to the present, scholars of Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and other regional literatures and cultures have spelled out their differences with either their Freudian or Foucauldian counterparts on the articulation of love, desire, and embodiment in these literatures (Alter 1997; Benton 2006; Dimock 1966; Doniger 1973; Doniger and Kakar 2002; Kakar 1989; Kakar and Ross 1986; Ramanujan 1981; Ramanujan, Rao, and Shulman 1994; Stoler…
Invisible women, visible histories: Gender, society and polity in North India (seventh to twelfth century AD) – By Devika Rangachari
Women and Slavery: Africa, The Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic, Volume 1
Women and Slavery: Africa, The Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic, Volume 1, edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2007, 399
Towards a morphogenesis of informal settlements
Informal settlement is the most pervasive mode of urbanization throughout cities of the global South, yet little is known of how informal urban design works as a production of urban space. This paper maps the emergence and transformation of street/laneway networks and buildings in a broad range of settlements. While such data cannot reveal the social, economic and political complexity of individual cases, it demonstrates the range of informal mor…
Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India
This volume shows that slaves acquired by some ruling households were incorporated into patterns of kinship. Colonial abolitionist measures did not even try to manumit these slaves; they restructured ideologies of marriage and succession instead and eroded the status of slave-descended members over time
Informal settlement is not a euphemism for ‘slum’: What’s at stake beyond the language
Everybody knows that the phrase ‘informal settlement’ is a widely used euphemism for ‘slum’, avoiding a word that can be seen to cast a stigma on neighbourhoods of the urban poor. Yet we have also long known that ‘informal settlement’ is a verb – identifying self-organised modes of production through which the urban poor produce affordable housing and urban infrastructure. Here we argue four key points. First, the distinction between slums and in…
Rising inequalities, deepening divides: Urban citizenship in the time of Covid-19
As governments around the globe navigate the effects of COVID-19 crisis, the urban poor endure the unevenly distributed socio-economic impacts of the pandemic. This burden is more pronounced in Global South megacities, where millions of people engage in precarious informal employment. We examine how the urban poor in Delhi (India), Dhaka (Bangladesh), and Manila (Philippines) have been disproportionately affected by the crisis. A cross-case analy…
A slave's quest for selfhood in eighteenth-century Hindustan
Women, Monastic Commerce, and Coverture in Eastern India circa 1600–1800 CE
This article argues that economic histories of the transition to colonial economics in the eighteenth century have overlooked the infrastructural investments that wives and widows made in networks of monastic commerce. Illustrative examples from late eighteenth-century records suggest that these networks competed with the commercial networks operated by private traders serving the English East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. T…
When "Sexuality" Floated Free of Histories in South Asia
From the 1960s to the present, scholars of Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and other regional literatures and cultures have spelled out their differences with either their Freudian or Foucauldian counterparts on the articulation of love, desire, and embodiment in these literatures (Alter 1997; Benton 2006; Dimock 1966; Doniger 1973; Doniger and Kakar 2002; Kakar 1989; Kakar and Ross 1986; Ramanujan 1981; Ramanujan, Rao, and Shulman 1994; Stoler…
Monastic Governmentality, Colonial Misogyny, and Postcolonial Amnesia in South Asia
Research Article| April 01 2013 Monastic Governmentality, Colonial Misogyny, and Postcolonial Amnesia in South Asia Indrani Chatterjee Indrani Chatterjee Indrani Chatterjee is currently Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and will join the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. She is the author of Gender, Slavery and the Law in Colonial India (1999), Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages …
Between poverty and the pyre: Moments in the history of widowhood
Slave-queen, waif-prince: Slavery and social capital in eighteenth-century India
Monastic ‘Governmentality: Revisiting ‘Community’ and ‘Communalism’ in South Asia
This essay extends and revises the Foucauldian concept of ‘governmentality’ in order to root theories about the ‘political community’ in the historical evidence available from the Indian subcontinent. It uses this revised understanding as a frame for rethinking issues of violence between identical communities relevant to understanding the violence of 1947‐1971. Such violence, the essay argues, was not tied to the inherent nature of any one commun…
Ādivāsīs, tribes and other neologisms for erasing precolonial pasts: An example from Northeast India
This essay engages Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sumit Guha and James C. Scott by arguing that all of them overlook a historically well-evidenced set of subject positions and concepts of space. This was monastic governmentality. Lay and ordained populations attached to monastic teachers and lineages moved and interacted across a vast network of societies till the eighteenth century. The arrival of colonial European armies in the terrain marked by monastic …
Afro-Asian Capital and Its Dissolution
This essay argues that a convergence of global and postcolonial scholarship has led to a dominant mode of reading precolonial records in ways that are colonial in their perspective and political purpose. It traces this dominance between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. The first section contains a historically specific discussion of wealth-in-people to situate Afro-Asians in the subcontinent. The second outlines two Mughal historians o…
Connected Histories and the Dream of Decolonial History
This essay argues that historians in post-colonial nation-states and spaces cannot offer connected histories across spaces shaped by war and the partitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It provides examples of these hurdles from a space called ‘Assam’ in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial archive. Native scribes collaborated with colonial Britons in writing accounts that set up spaces as culturally separate and disconnect…
Epistemic Justice and the University: Reclaiming the Academy for Emancipatory Urban Praxis
This essay offers provocations on the possibilities and challenges of advancing ‘epistemic justice’ in urban research, with particular care for the growing ‘academic precariat’. We explore some of the institutional barriers and possibilities of doing collaborative justice‐oriented work within urban and built environment scholarship, especially for those fixed‐term, early career, casual academics, independent scholars or those with career breaks. …
Building climate resilience through energy access? An empirical study on grid connectivity in the Indian Sundarbans
Scholarly debates on energy and climate change have successfully foregrounded mitigation measures, but often overlook the role of energy in climate adaptation. Adaptation is of key importance to building resilience to climate change impacts, but its link with energy access has not been studied in detail. This study aims to address this research gap by examining the relation between electricity access and climate resilience in the context of Bally…
Tracking ‘Same–Sex Love’ from Antiquity to the Present in South Asia
This essay focuses on the anthology Same–Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000), edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai. Unlike many other recently published, celebratory ‘gay anthologies’, this book contributes to ongoing scholarly work on specific same–sex erotic practices and relations in historical and cultural context. We examine issues relevant to this anthology and other such projects: the use of ‘love’ and ‘same–s…
Testing the local against the colonial archive
Testing the local against the colonial archive Get access I Chatterjee I Chatterjee Department of History, Miranda House, Delhi University, India Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 44, Issue 1, AUTUMN 1997, Pages 215–224, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/1997.44.215 Published: 01 January 1997
Subaltern Studies III & IV: A Review Article
Between poverty and the pyre: Moments in the history of widowhood
Testing the local against the colonial archive
Testing the local against the colonial archive Get access I Chatterjee I Chatterjee Department of History, Miranda House, Delhi University, India Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 44, Issue 1, AUTUMN 1997, Pages 215–224, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/1997.44.215 Published: 01 January 1997
Slave-queen, waif-prince: Slavery and social capital in eighteenth-century India
A slave's quest for selfhood in eighteenth-century Hindustan
Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India
This volume shows that slaves acquired by some ruling households were incorporated into patterns of kinship. Colonial abolitionist measures did not even try to manumit these slaves; they restructured ideologies of marriage and succession instead and eroded the status of slave-descended members over time
Tracking ‘Same–Sex Love’ from Antiquity to the Present in South Asia
This essay focuses on the anthology Same–Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000), edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai. Unlike many other recently published, celebratory ‘gay anthologies’, this book contributes to ongoing scholarly work on specific same–sex erotic practices and relations in historical and cultural context. We examine issues relevant to this anthology and other such projects: the use of ‘love’ and ‘same–s…
Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice (review)
Slavery and South Asian History
Original essays explore the reality of slavery in the South Asian past
Pious Flames: European Encounters with Sati 1500–1830 by Andrea Major
Women and Slavery: Africa, The Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic, Volume 1
Women and Slavery: Africa, The Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic, Volume 1, edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2007, 399
Invisible women, visible histories: Gender, society and polity in North India (seventh to twelfth century AD) – By Devika Rangachari
When "Sexuality" Floated Free of Histories in South Asia
From the 1960s to the present, scholars of Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and other regional literatures and cultures have spelled out their differences with either their Freudian or Foucauldian counterparts on the articulation of love, desire, and embodiment in these literatures (Alter 1997; Benton 2006; Dimock 1966; Doniger 1973; Doniger and Kakar 2002; Kakar 1989; Kakar and Ross 1986; Ramanujan 1981; Ramanujan, Rao, and Shulman 1994; Stoler…
Conclusion
The chapter summarises the century long processes that resulted in the growth of ethnology under military aegis in the colony, and especially traces the ways in which such ethnology rests on the physical obliteration of monastic subjects in the northeast Indian regions in the early twentieth century. After 1947, eminent historians of India used the same colonial language to write about populations in northeast India as though they shared nothing …
Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India
Monastic Governmentality, Colonial Misogyny, and Postcolonial Amnesia in South Asia
Research Article| April 01 2013 Monastic Governmentality, Colonial Misogyny, and Postcolonial Amnesia in South Asia Indrani Chatterjee Indrani Chatterjee Indrani Chatterjee is currently Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and will join the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. She is the author of Gender, Slavery and the Law in Colonial India (1999), Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages …
Monastic ‘Governmentality: Revisiting ‘Community’ and ‘Communalism’ in South Asia
This essay extends and revises the Foucauldian concept of ‘governmentality’ in order to root theories about the ‘political community’ in the historical evidence available from the Indian subcontinent. It uses this revised understanding as a frame for rethinking issues of violence between identical communities relevant to understanding the violence of 1947‐1971. Such violence, the essay argues, was not tied to the inherent nature of any one commun…
Ādivāsīs, tribes and other neologisms for erasing precolonial pasts: An example from Northeast India
This essay engages Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sumit Guha and James C. Scott by arguing that all of them overlook a historically well-evidenced set of subject positions and concepts of space. This was monastic governmentality. Lay and ordained populations attached to monastic teachers and lineages moved and interacted across a vast network of societies till the eighteenth century. The arrival of colonial European armies in the terrain marked by monastic …
Women, Monastic Commerce, and Coverture in Eastern India circa 1600–1800 CE
This article argues that economic histories of the transition to colonial economics in the eighteenth century have overlooked the infrastructural investments that wives and widows made in networks of monastic commerce. Illustrative examples from late eighteenth-century records suggest that these networks competed with the commercial networks operated by private traders serving the English East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. T…
ABO and Rhesus Blood Groups: A Study among the Lodhas of Paschim Medinipur, West Bengal
Connected Histories and the Dream of Decolonial History
This essay argues that historians in post-colonial nation-states and spaces cannot offer connected histories across spaces shaped by war and the partitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It provides examples of these hurdles from a space called ‘Assam’ in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial archive. Native scribes collaborated with colonial Britons in writing accounts that set up spaces as culturally separate and disconnect…
Afro-Asian Capital and Its Dissolution
This essay argues that a convergence of global and postcolonial scholarship has led to a dominant mode of reading precolonial records in ways that are colonial in their perspective and political purpose. It traces this dominance between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. The first section contains a historically specific discussion of wealth-in-people to situate Afro-Asians in the subcontinent. The second outlines two Mughal historians o…
Heroic Shāktism: The Cult of Durgā in Ancient Indian Kingship, by Bihani Sarkar
Since the early twentieth century there have been three broad trends in the study of Indic goddesses. The first was shaped by evolutionary philosophy and anthropology in holding that societies grew from ‘mother-right’ in their primitive stages to those which upheld ‘father-right’. This tradition, represented by scholars such as Ramaprasad Chanda (1916) and N.N. Bhattacharya (1971, 1977), studied Sanskritic texts such as the Veda and Purana for th…
When Sun Meets Moon: Gender, Eros and Ecstasy in Urdu Poetry, written by Kugle, Scott
Kugle, Scott. When Sun Meets Moon: Gender, Eros and Ecstasy in Urdu Poetry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 348 pp.; $34.95.Ever since Foucault claimed that Western European medical and psychoanalytical discourses generated a “science of sexuality” (scientia sexualis) while the non-West remained the domain of ars erotica, historians of the non-West have sought to place premodern Arab-Islamic, Persianate and regional South A…
Whose History? What Theory
Kleinberg, Scott, and Wilder’s call for a closer relationship between critical thinking and history writing (iii.1–iii.10) so closely resonates with my own training in postcolonial Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru Universities in India that I feel impelled to engage the essayists even though the audiences the authors address are very different from mine.Let me begin with a caveat. The contextualization that the essayists distance themselves from is per…
History (23 works) · Political science (18 works) · Sociology (17 works) · History (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Archaeology (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Ancient history (9 works)