Nandini Chatterjee
Biographic Data
| ID | 3586630 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nandini Chatterjee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nandini |
| FAMILY NAME | Chatterjee |
| SIGNATURE | CHATTERJEE N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8977-7355 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
"I Have Stopped Caring if I Should Think Before Posting Online": Journey of Indian Women to Digital Activism Against Sexual Violence
Indian women activists are increasingly integrating digital strategies in their fight against the burning issue of sexual violence. Their digital strategies help them navigate the Indian socio-digital landscape, which is an extension of the sociocultural context they live in. There are limited studies in the area of digital feminist activism emerging from the Global South, especially from the context of post-colonial India. There is a concerning …
Law between Empires: Bengal under British Rule in the Age of Revolutions
Education Inc: When a Corporation Tried to Educate a Nation
The Mughals and the Sufis: Islam and the Political Imagination in India, 1500–1750 By Muzaffar Alam
The study of Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, known as taṣawwuf to those closer to the sources and practices, has come a long way since Richard Eaton complained in 1978 that it was mainly studied as doctrine.1 Eaton noted that scholars tended to study the ideas of individual Sufis, with no attention to the societies and polities in which the Sufi saints lived. Eaton’s comment prefaced his seminal study of Sufis in the medieval kingdom of Bij…
Paper Empires: Layers of Law in Colonial South Asia and the Indian Ocean
Anthropologists and historians have recently underscored the ways in which European colonialism created novel regimes of legality and record-keeping, associated with ambitious and exclusive state-centered claims to both truth and rights, while being inevitably and constantly sucked into eddies of forgery and corruption. However, attention so far has been focused on English/European-language records and the colonial institutions that produced, sto…
The Power of Parwanas: Indo-Persian Grants and the Making of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Southern India
This article examines Persian-language orders—parwanas—issued by regimes that succeeded the Mughal Empire in South Asia, to European trading companies. Focussing in particular on the mid-eighteenth-century exchanges between the Nizam of Hyderabad; the Nawab of Arcot; and the French Compagnie des Indes , we see how Mughal-style parwanas, or sub-imperial orders, previously used to give instructions or to make or withdraw grants, were transformed in…
Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, by Javed MajeedNation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, by Javed Majeed
South Asia is among the most densely multi-lingual regions of the world. The Linguistic Survey of India (henceforth LSI), conducted under British rule between 1894 and 1927, and encompassing information about 723 language varieties, was one of the largest projects for the study of languages ever undertaken. It was also a deeply colonial project, directed by a passionate, obsessive, opinionated and, at times, anxious British colonial administrator…
Introduction: The Persianate Bazaar
The collection of essays in this volume examines forms of business documentation in the late Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Looking upon business in its broadest sense, the themes range from property disputes within families to inter-polity and inter-imperial deals, all of which is captured within the notion of the bazaar. Presenting documents and documentary forms written in Persian, but a…
Translating Obligations: Tamassuk and Fārigh-khaṭṭī in the Indo-Persian World
A necessarily widespread feature of language practice in the Persianate world was the need for translation of speech and text, with a range of lexical and semantic challenges involved in taking meaning from one language to another. This article focusses on legal translation, with its highly functional aims, by following the career of a pair of Indo-Persian legal forms known as tamassuk and fārigh-khaṭṭī , used for recording obligation and requita…
Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires
Based on a completely reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents, Nandini Chatterjee provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the twentieth century. By exploring their daily interactions with imperial elites as well as villagers and marauders, Chatterjee offers a new history from below of the Mughal Empire, far from the glitt…
Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires
Based on a completely reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents, Nandini Chatterjee provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the twentieth century. By exploring their daily interactions with imperial elites as well as villagers and marauders, Chatterjee offers a new history from below of the Mughal Empire, far from the glitt…
Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire, by Jennifer Pitts
This erudite and critical history of European imaginations of inter-state relations is exceptionally topical as Brexit looms over Britain and Europe. Jennifer Pitts convincingly argues that, since the late seventeenth century, European discussions about themselves have inevitably been about Europe’s place in the wider world. With her first book, A Turn to Empire (2005), Pitts established herself as a stalwart in the field of the history of ideas …
The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London by Nile Green
This is a gem of a book about six Iranian students, who were sent to England in 1815 by the Iranian crown prince, Abbas Mirza, to acquire the ‘new learning’ of the West, in the hope that such knowledge could help Iran hold her own within the aggressive political geography of the nineteenth century, especially against imperial Russia. The Iranian prince dumped the students, without adequate funding, on a rather fortuitously named Captain D’Arcy, a…
The Next Social Contract: Animals, the Anthropocene and biopolitics
The book is an amazing amalgam of new perspectives on animal related issues. The philosophical context of the work gives it a unique dimension. The question of animal ethics has never been so clear
Mahzar-namas in the Mughal and British Empires: The Uses of an Indo-Islamic Legal Form
This paper looks at a Persian-language documentary form called the mahzar-nama that was widely used in India between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to narrate, represent, and record antecedents, entitlements, and injuries with a view to securing legal rights and redressing legal wrongs. Mahzars were a known documentary form in Islamic law and used by qazis (Islamic judges) in many other parts of the world, but in India they took a numbe…
Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843, by Andrea Major
This very well-written book is a valuable addition to the still small but growing body of research that is beginning to bridge the logically unsustainable divide between the fields of British imper
Reflections on Religious Difference and Permissive Inclusion in Mughal Law
This article investigates the “pre-history” of the colonial and postcolonial personal (status) laws of India, which tie religious identity with legal status, particularly in matters of family law. It examines the concept of law and legal jurisdictions in Mughal India (1526-early eighteenth century; officially 1857): a unique political formation in which an Islamic state ruled over a populace which was predominantly non-Muslim. Using Mughal offici…
Law and the Spaces of Empire: Introduction to the Special Issue
Law and the Spaces of EmpireIntroduction to the Special Issue Nandini Chatterjee and Lakshmi Subramanian This special issue is a reflection on the role of law in structuring the real and imagined spaces of empire. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in imperial history, motivated by the perceived need to recover the specific political, economic, social and psychological routes traversed by different portions of the world in the journey t…
Hindu City and Just Empire: Banaras and India in Ali Ibrahim Khan's legal imagination
This article examines the career and ideas of a late Mughal administrator, a Shi'a Muslim called Ali Ibrahim Khan, who was appointed magistrate of the north Indian city of Banaras after its conquest by the East India Company in 1781, and remained in that position until his death in 1792. Engaging with recent research on legal pluralism on the one hand, and on legal and cultural intermediaries on the other, this paper examines the imagination of i…
Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire , by Avril A. Powell
Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire, by Avril A. Powell. Worlds of the East India Company series. Rochester, New York, Boydell Press, 2010. xviii, 318 pp. $125.00 US (cloth). In this richly contextualised double biography of two very different men from nineteenth-century Scotland, both Orientalist scholars and employees of the English East India Company and then the British Raj in India, Avril Powell…
Muslim or Christian? Family Quarrels and Religious Diagnosis in a Colonial Court
JUDICIAL COMMITTEE of the Privy Council, the highest court of the British Empire, heard an appeal of a decision by the Allahabad High Court in India in which it was asked to decide who had the right of parental custody of a teenage girl and heiress named Victoria Skinner, alias Nawshaba Begum. 1 Specifically, the judges were asked to decide whether the girl's mother, Helen Skinner, should be deemed to have lost her parental rights by reason of he…
Sustainable Development and Climate Change
edited by Sunjoy Joshi and Marlies Linke, Academic Foundation, New Delhi in association with Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, in partnership with Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Berlin, 2011, 282
Global Medical Geography
The basalt stone quarries of eastern India
Quarrying of basalt stone in the Early Cretaceous Rajmahal Trap region of eastern India is increasing at an alarming pace. The quarries have created an extensive ugly landscape of pits and overburden dumps. The stone workshops continuously emit dust. These quarries generate year‐round employment in an impoverished terrain. The workforce mostly comprises the socio‐economically deprived indigenous tribal population. They are an important source of …
Religious change, social conflict and legal competition: The emergence of Christian personal law in colonial India
One of the most contentious political issues in postcolonial India is the unfulfilled project of a 'uniform civil code' which would override the existing 'personal laws' or religion-based laws of domestic relations, inheritance and religious institutions. If the personal laws are admitted to be preserved (if somewhat distorted) remnants of 'religious laws', then the legitimacy of state intervention is called into question, especially since the In…
Mahzar-namas in the Mughal and British Empires: The Uses of an Indo-Islamic Legal Form
This paper looks at a Persian-language documentary form called the mahzar-nama that was widely used in India between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to narrate, represent, and record antecedents, entitlements, and injuries with a view to securing legal rights and redressing legal wrongs. Mahzars were a known documentary form in Islamic law and used by qazis (Islamic judges) in many other parts of the world, but in India they took a numbe…
English Law, Brahmo Marriage, and the Problem of Religious Difference: Civil Marriage Laws in Britain and India
On the face of it, civil marriage represents both the most typical and most anodyne aspect of modern law. One might say that by instituting civil marriage, a bureaucratic, enumerative, and secularized state permits its subjects absolute individual choice of marital partners, and concurrently, by refusing to take into account the religious affiliation of any party, grants total freedom of religious faith. As such, it may be seen as a quintessentia…
Religious change, social conflict and legal competition: The emergence of Christian personal law in colonial India
One of the most contentious political issues in postcolonial India is the unfulfilled project of a 'uniform civil code' which would override the existing 'personal laws' or religion-based laws of domestic relations, inheritance and religious institutions. If the personal laws are admitted to be preserved (if somewhat distorted) remnants of 'religious laws', then the legitimacy of state intervention is called into question, especially since the In…
Hindu City and Just Empire: Banaras and India in Ali Ibrahim Khan's legal imagination
This article examines the career and ideas of a late Mughal administrator, a Shi'a Muslim called Ali Ibrahim Khan, who was appointed magistrate of the north Indian city of Banaras after its conquest by the East India Company in 1781, and remained in that position until his death in 1792. Engaging with recent research on legal pluralism on the one hand, and on legal and cultural intermediaries on the other, this paper examines the imagination of i…
Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires
Based on a completely reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents, Nandini Chatterjee provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the twentieth century. By exploring their daily interactions with imperial elites as well as villagers and marauders, Chatterjee offers a new history from below of the Mughal Empire, far from the glitt…
The Next Social Contract: Animals, the Anthropocene and biopolitics
The book is an amazing amalgam of new perspectives on animal related issues. The philosophical context of the work gives it a unique dimension. The question of animal ethics has never been so clear
Law and the Spaces of Empire: Introduction to the Special Issue
Law and the Spaces of EmpireIntroduction to the Special Issue Nandini Chatterjee and Lakshmi Subramanian This special issue is a reflection on the role of law in structuring the real and imagined spaces of empire. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in imperial history, motivated by the perceived need to recover the specific political, economic, social and psychological routes traversed by different portions of the world in the journey t…
The Power of Parwanas: Indo-Persian Grants and the Making of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Southern India
This article examines Persian-language orders—parwanas—issued by regimes that succeeded the Mughal Empire in South Asia, to European trading companies. Focussing in particular on the mid-eighteenth-century exchanges between the Nizam of Hyderabad; the Nawab of Arcot; and the French Compagnie des Indes , we see how Mughal-style parwanas, or sub-imperial orders, previously used to give instructions or to make or withdraw grants, were transformed in…
Introduction: The Persianate Bazaar
The collection of essays in this volume examines forms of business documentation in the late Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Looking upon business in its broadest sense, the themes range from property disputes within families to inter-polity and inter-imperial deals, all of which is captured within the notion of the bazaar. Presenting documents and documentary forms written in Persian, but a…
Agro‐climatic Perspective on Irrigation in West Bengal, India: A District Level Analysis
The basalt stone quarries of eastern India
Quarrying of basalt stone in the Early Cretaceous Rajmahal Trap region of eastern India is increasing at an alarming pace. The quarries have created an extensive ugly landscape of pits and overburden dumps. The stone workshops continuously emit dust. These quarries generate year‐round employment in an impoverished terrain. The workforce mostly comprises the socio‐economically deprived indigenous tribal population. They are an important source of …
Religious change, social conflict and legal competition: The emergence of Christian personal law in colonial India
One of the most contentious political issues in postcolonial India is the unfulfilled project of a 'uniform civil code' which would override the existing 'personal laws' or religion-based laws of domestic relations, inheritance and religious institutions. If the personal laws are admitted to be preserved (if somewhat distorted) remnants of 'religious laws', then the legitimacy of state intervention is called into question, especially since the In…
English Law, Brahmo Marriage, and the Problem of Religious Difference: Civil Marriage Laws in Britain and India
On the face of it, civil marriage represents both the most typical and most anodyne aspect of modern law. One might say that by instituting civil marriage, a bureaucratic, enumerative, and secularized state permits its subjects absolute individual choice of marital partners, and concurrently, by refusing to take into account the religious affiliation of any party, grants total freedom of religious faith. As such, it may be seen as a quintessentia…
Sustainable Development and Climate Change
edited by Sunjoy Joshi and Marlies Linke, Academic Foundation, New Delhi in association with Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, in partnership with Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Berlin, 2011, 282
Global Medical Geography
Muslim or Christian? Family Quarrels and Religious Diagnosis in a Colonial Court
JUDICIAL COMMITTEE of the Privy Council, the highest court of the British Empire, heard an appeal of a decision by the Allahabad High Court in India in which it was asked to decide who had the right of parental custody of a teenage girl and heiress named Victoria Skinner, alias Nawshaba Begum. 1 Specifically, the judges were asked to decide whether the girl's mother, Helen Skinner, should be deemed to have lost her parental rights by reason of he…
Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire , by Avril A. Powell
Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire, by Avril A. Powell. Worlds of the East India Company series. Rochester, New York, Boydell Press, 2010. xviii, 318 pp. $125.00 US (cloth). In this richly contextualised double biography of two very different men from nineteenth-century Scotland, both Orientalist scholars and employees of the English East India Company and then the British Raj in India, Avril Powell…
Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843, by Andrea Major
This very well-written book is a valuable addition to the still small but growing body of research that is beginning to bridge the logically unsustainable divide between the fields of British imper
Reflections on Religious Difference and Permissive Inclusion in Mughal Law
This article investigates the “pre-history” of the colonial and postcolonial personal (status) laws of India, which tie religious identity with legal status, particularly in matters of family law. It examines the concept of law and legal jurisdictions in Mughal India (1526-early eighteenth century; officially 1857): a unique political formation in which an Islamic state ruled over a populace which was predominantly non-Muslim. Using Mughal offici…
Law and the Spaces of Empire: Introduction to the Special Issue
Law and the Spaces of EmpireIntroduction to the Special Issue Nandini Chatterjee and Lakshmi Subramanian This special issue is a reflection on the role of law in structuring the real and imagined spaces of empire. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in imperial history, motivated by the perceived need to recover the specific political, economic, social and psychological routes traversed by different portions of the world in the journey t…
Hindu City and Just Empire: Banaras and India in Ali Ibrahim Khan's legal imagination
This article examines the career and ideas of a late Mughal administrator, a Shi'a Muslim called Ali Ibrahim Khan, who was appointed magistrate of the north Indian city of Banaras after its conquest by the East India Company in 1781, and remained in that position until his death in 1792. Engaging with recent research on legal pluralism on the one hand, and on legal and cultural intermediaries on the other, this paper examines the imagination of i…
Mahzar-namas in the Mughal and British Empires: The Uses of an Indo-Islamic Legal Form
This paper looks at a Persian-language documentary form called the mahzar-nama that was widely used in India between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to narrate, represent, and record antecedents, entitlements, and injuries with a view to securing legal rights and redressing legal wrongs. Mahzars were a known documentary form in Islamic law and used by qazis (Islamic judges) in many other parts of the world, but in India they took a numbe…
The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London by Nile Green
This is a gem of a book about six Iranian students, who were sent to England in 1815 by the Iranian crown prince, Abbas Mirza, to acquire the ‘new learning’ of the West, in the hope that such knowledge could help Iran hold her own within the aggressive political geography of the nineteenth century, especially against imperial Russia. The Iranian prince dumped the students, without adequate funding, on a rather fortuitously named Captain D’Arcy, a…
The Next Social Contract: Animals, the Anthropocene and biopolitics
The book is an amazing amalgam of new perspectives on animal related issues. The philosophical context of the work gives it a unique dimension. The question of animal ethics has never been so clear
Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire, by Jennifer Pitts
This erudite and critical history of European imaginations of inter-state relations is exceptionally topical as Brexit looms over Britain and Europe. Jennifer Pitts convincingly argues that, since the late seventeenth century, European discussions about themselves have inevitably been about Europe’s place in the wider world. With her first book, A Turn to Empire (2005), Pitts established herself as a stalwart in the field of the history of ideas …
Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires
Based on a completely reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents, Nandini Chatterjee provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the twentieth century. By exploring their daily interactions with imperial elites as well as villagers and marauders, Chatterjee offers a new history from below of the Mughal Empire, far from the glitt…
Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires
Based on a completely reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents, Nandini Chatterjee provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the twentieth century. By exploring their daily interactions with imperial elites as well as villagers and marauders, Chatterjee offers a new history from below of the Mughal Empire, far from the glitt…
Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, by Javed MajeedNation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, by Javed Majeed
South Asia is among the most densely multi-lingual regions of the world. The Linguistic Survey of India (henceforth LSI), conducted under British rule between 1894 and 1927, and encompassing information about 723 language varieties, was one of the largest projects for the study of languages ever undertaken. It was also a deeply colonial project, directed by a passionate, obsessive, opinionated and, at times, anxious British colonial administrator…
Introduction: The Persianate Bazaar
The collection of essays in this volume examines forms of business documentation in the late Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Looking upon business in its broadest sense, the themes range from property disputes within families to inter-polity and inter-imperial deals, all of which is captured within the notion of the bazaar. Presenting documents and documentary forms written in Persian, but a…
Translating Obligations: Tamassuk and Fārigh-khaṭṭī in the Indo-Persian World
A necessarily widespread feature of language practice in the Persianate world was the need for translation of speech and text, with a range of lexical and semantic challenges involved in taking meaning from one language to another. This article focusses on legal translation, with its highly functional aims, by following the career of a pair of Indo-Persian legal forms known as tamassuk and fārigh-khaṭṭī , used for recording obligation and requita…
The Power of Parwanas: Indo-Persian Grants and the Making of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Southern India
This article examines Persian-language orders—parwanas—issued by regimes that succeeded the Mughal Empire in South Asia, to European trading companies. Focussing in particular on the mid-eighteenth-century exchanges between the Nizam of Hyderabad; the Nawab of Arcot; and the French Compagnie des Indes , we see how Mughal-style parwanas, or sub-imperial orders, previously used to give instructions or to make or withdraw grants, were transformed in…
The Mughals and the Sufis: Islam and the Political Imagination in India, 1500–1750 By Muzaffar Alam
The study of Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, known as taṣawwuf to those closer to the sources and practices, has come a long way since Richard Eaton complained in 1978 that it was mainly studied as doctrine.1 Eaton noted that scholars tended to study the ideas of individual Sufis, with no attention to the societies and polities in which the Sufi saints lived. Eaton’s comment prefaced his seminal study of Sufis in the medieval kingdom of Bij…
Paper Empires: Layers of Law in Colonial South Asia and the Indian Ocean
Anthropologists and historians have recently underscored the ways in which European colonialism created novel regimes of legality and record-keeping, associated with ambitious and exclusive state-centered claims to both truth and rights, while being inevitably and constantly sucked into eddies of forgery and corruption. However, attention so far has been focused on English/European-language records and the colonial institutions that produced, sto…
"I Have Stopped Caring if I Should Think Before Posting Online": Journey of Indian Women to Digital Activism Against Sexual Violence
Indian women activists are increasingly integrating digital strategies in their fight against the burning issue of sexual violence. Their digital strategies help them navigate the Indian socio-digital landscape, which is an extension of the sociocultural context they live in. There are limited studies in the area of digital feminist activism emerging from the Global South, especially from the context of post-colonial India. There is a concerning …
Political science (19 works) · Law (17 works) · History (16 works) · Law (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · History (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Ancient history (10 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (9 works) · Politics (9 works)