Uday Chandra
Biographic Data
| ID | 3677424 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Uday Chandra |
| GIVEN NAMES | Uday |
| FAMILY NAME | Chandra |
| SIGNATURE | CHANDRA U |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgetown University in Qatar |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2071-9779 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 141 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The curious trajectory of caste in West Bengal politics
Two. Colonial Paternalism and the Making of the Modern Tribal Subject
Resistance As Negotiation
"Tribes" appear worldwide today as vestiges of a pre-modern past at odds with the workings of modern states. Acts of resistance and rebellion by groups designated as "tribal" have fascinated as well as perplexed administrators and scholars in South Asia and beyond. Tribal resistance and rebellion are held to be tragic yet heroic political acts by "subaltern" groups confronting omnipotent states. By contrast, this book draws on fifteen years of ar…
A Roundtable on Rupa Viswanath'sThe Pariah Problem
In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book,The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour c…
A Divided City in a Time of Pandemic
Primitive Accumulation and “Primitive” Subjects in Postcolonial India
In late 2008 a five-minute video clip entitled Gaon Chodab Nahin (literally, “We Shall Not Leave Our Village”) came into circulation among activists and grassroots NGOs in the forest highlands of eastern India. To those who watched and passed on the video throughout the eastern Indian states of Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa, it summed up the plight of adivasi or “tribal” populations in the region as they battled an emerging state–corporate ne…
Modernity of Slavery
Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and the Specter of Universalism
Following recent debates between Vivek Chibber and leading postcolonial theorists, I probe into what is missing in these exchanges. I focus on the figure of the 'tribal' in modern India in Ranajit Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India and Alpa Shah's In the Shadows of the State, both of which claim to offer emic perspectives on subaltern politics and history. Yet both works, despite their undeniable differences, displa…
The demands of recognition
Townsend Middleton's The Demands of Recognition is an invitation to think through the everyday dilemmas of ethnic minorities as well as the state anthropologists who certify them as 'scheduled trib
Flaming fields and forest fires
The purpose of this article is to question the overarching notion of 'millenarianism' as well as its applicability to various 'tribal' rebellions and social movements in British India. I do so by carefully re-reading the colonial archives and secondary sources concerning the Birsaite uprising afresh in order to rethink how certain forest-dwelling groups who came to be defined as 'tribes' in colonial times actually encountered the modern state as …
Recasting Caste
Hira Singh's Recasting Caste presents the most sophisticated Marxist anthropology of caste in India to date. Singh's thesis is strikingly simple: caste, far from embodying a cultural or religious p
Towards Adivasi Studies
Daniel J. Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta (eds), The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2011, xvii + 238 pp., $112.57 (hbk). Sanjukta Das Gupta and Raj Sekhar Basu (eds), Narratives from the Margins: Aspects of Adivasi History in India. Primus Books, New Delhi, 2012, 312 pp., INR 995. Crispin Bates and Alpa Shah (eds), Savage Attack: Tribal Insurgency in India. Social Science Press, New Delhi, 2014, …
Globalizing Citizens
As processes of globalization permeate our disparate lifeworlds, scholars of social movements are rightly asking whether and to what extent our existing theories of citizenship, claim-making, and d
Rethinking Subaltern Resistance
This special issue seeks to rethink "resistance" as a critical social science concept in the light of a range of critiques since the 1980s. The five articles in this issue draw their empirical materials from contemporary India, but their arguments have significant implications for those working on other parts of Asia and the world. The articles acknowledge the inherent ambiguities and ambivalences of subaltern resistance in the face of hegemonic …
The Maoist Movement in Contemporary India
Additional informationNotes on contributorsUday ChandraUday Chandra is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. His research interests lie at the intersection between agrarian studies, comparative studies of state formation and resistance, postcolonial theory, political anthropology and South Asian history. His dissertation studies the historical origins and social bases of the contemporary Maoist insurgency in…
A matter of belief
Microfinance and its discontents
In the shadows of the state
For academics and activists fighting for the rights of indigenous peoples, the ‘moral force of indigenous politics’ (Jung 2008) is never in doubt. Leftists who once mobilized factory workers, landl
The Case for a Postcolonial Approach to the Study of Politics
Postcolonialism is now an extensive body of knowledge that draws on Edward Said's Orientalism, the Subaltern Studies collective, and other critical anti-colonial scholarship. While postcolonial scholars have significantly shaped humanistic disciplines such as history, comparative literature, and anthropology, their impact on political science has been limited. The resistance to postcolonialism is strongly associated with the perpetuation of Euroc…
Beyond subalternity
Subalterns, as Ranajit Guha famously argued, resist modern states on the basis of pre-existing social solidarities and an autonomous domain of consciousness. Critics of subaltern studies have argued, however, that subaltern resistance is, in fact, deeply implicated in the symbols and discourses of domination rather than simply constituting an autonomous political domain. Might it be possible to take this criticism of subalternity seriously and ye…
Liberalism and Its Other
Liberalism is widely regarded as a modern intellectual tradition that defends the rights and freedoms of autonomous individuals. Yet, in both colonial and postcolonial contexts, liberal theorists and lawmakers have struggled to defend the rights and freedoms of political subjects whom they regard as "primitive," "backward," or "indigenous." Liberalism thus recurrently encounters its primitive other, a face-off that gives rise to a peculiar set of…
Introduction. Selves and Society in Postcolonial India
On 16 December 2012, a twenty-three year old physiotherapist was gangraped in Munirka, New Delhi by six men in a bus. Thirteen days later, she passed away in Singapore, having suffered serious brain and gastrointestinal injuries. This case snowballed into a nationwide wave of protests on not only the heinousness of this particular incident, but the widespread public patriarchy that afflicts the right of Indian women to freely access public domain…
Going Primitive
How and why did a labor union organizer from Goa, a former Naxalite student cadre from West Bengal and a Jesuit priest from Tamil Nadu end up as spokespersons for adivasi rights in contemporary Jharkhand? What caused their discourse to shift from tribal/adivasi to indigeneity? Might indigeneity be an ideology for them? To answer these questions, this paper analyzes the oral histories of three leading indigenous rights activists in Jharkhand. In t…
Ethnic Activism and Civil Society in South Asia (Governance, Conflict, and Civic Action Series, Vol. 2)/Varieties of Activist Experience
Rethinking Subaltern Resistance
This special issue seeks to rethink "resistance" as a critical social science concept in the light of a range of critiques since the 1980s. The five articles in this issue draw their empirical materials from contemporary India, but their arguments have significant implications for those working on other parts of Asia and the world. The articles acknowledge the inherent ambiguities and ambivalences of subaltern resistance in the face of hegemonic …
Liberalism and Its Other
Liberalism is widely regarded as a modern intellectual tradition that defends the rights and freedoms of autonomous individuals. Yet, in both colonial and postcolonial contexts, liberal theorists and lawmakers have struggled to defend the rights and freedoms of political subjects whom they regard as "primitive," "backward," or "indigenous." Liberalism thus recurrently encounters its primitive other, a face-off that gives rise to a peculiar set of…
Beyond subalternity
Subalterns, as Ranajit Guha famously argued, resist modern states on the basis of pre-existing social solidarities and an autonomous domain of consciousness. Critics of subaltern studies have argued, however, that subaltern resistance is, in fact, deeply implicated in the symbols and discourses of domination rather than simply constituting an autonomous political domain. Might it be possible to take this criticism of subalternity seriously and ye…
Flaming fields and forest fires
The purpose of this article is to question the overarching notion of 'millenarianism' as well as its applicability to various 'tribal' rebellions and social movements in British India. I do so by carefully re-reading the colonial archives and secondary sources concerning the Birsaite uprising afresh in order to rethink how certain forest-dwelling groups who came to be defined as 'tribes' in colonial times actually encountered the modern state as …
The Case for a Postcolonial Approach to the Study of Politics
Postcolonialism is now an extensive body of knowledge that draws on Edward Said's Orientalism, the Subaltern Studies collective, and other critical anti-colonial scholarship. While postcolonial scholars have significantly shaped humanistic disciplines such as history, comparative literature, and anthropology, their impact on political science has been limited. The resistance to postcolonialism is strongly associated with the perpetuation of Euroc…
Introduction. Selves and Society in Postcolonial India
On 16 December 2012, a twenty-three year old physiotherapist was gangraped in Munirka, New Delhi by six men in a bus. Thirteen days later, she passed away in Singapore, having suffered serious brain and gastrointestinal injuries. This case snowballed into a nationwide wave of protests on not only the heinousness of this particular incident, but the widespread public patriarchy that afflicts the right of Indian women to freely access public domain…
The Maoist Movement in Contemporary India
Additional informationNotes on contributorsUday ChandraUday Chandra is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. His research interests lie at the intersection between agrarian studies, comparative studies of state formation and resistance, postcolonial theory, political anthropology and South Asian history. His dissertation studies the historical origins and social bases of the contemporary Maoist insurgency in…
The demands of recognition
Townsend Middleton's The Demands of Recognition is an invitation to think through the everyday dilemmas of ethnic minorities as well as the state anthropologists who certify them as 'scheduled trib
A Roundtable on Rupa Viswanath'sThe Pariah Problem
In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book,The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour c…
Towards Adivasi Studies
Daniel J. Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta (eds), The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2011, xvii + 238 pp., $112.57 (hbk). Sanjukta Das Gupta and Raj Sekhar Basu (eds), Narratives from the Margins: Aspects of Adivasi History in India. Primus Books, New Delhi, 2012, 312 pp., INR 995. Crispin Bates and Alpa Shah (eds), Savage Attack: Tribal Insurgency in India. Social Science Press, New Delhi, 2014, …
Going Primitive
How and why did a labor union organizer from Goa, a former Naxalite student cadre from West Bengal and a Jesuit priest from Tamil Nadu end up as spokespersons for adivasi rights in contemporary Jharkhand? What caused their discourse to shift from tribal/adivasi to indigeneity? Might indigeneity be an ideology for them? To answer these questions, this paper analyzes the oral histories of three leading indigenous rights activists in Jharkhand. In t…
Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and the Specter of Universalism
Following recent debates between Vivek Chibber and leading postcolonial theorists, I probe into what is missing in these exchanges. I focus on the figure of the 'tribal' in modern India in Ranajit Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India and Alpa Shah's In the Shadows of the State, both of which claim to offer emic perspectives on subaltern politics and history. Yet both works, despite their undeniable differences, displa…
Ethnic Activism and Civil Society in South Asia (Governance, Conflict, and Civic Action Series, Vol. 2)/Varieties of Activist Experience
Microfinance and its discontents
In the shadows of the state
For academics and activists fighting for the rights of indigenous peoples, the ‘moral force of indigenous politics’ (Jung 2008) is never in doubt. Leftists who once mobilized factory workers, landl
The Case for a Postcolonial Approach to the Study of Politics
Postcolonialism is now an extensive body of knowledge that draws on Edward Said's Orientalism, the Subaltern Studies collective, and other critical anti-colonial scholarship. While postcolonial scholars have significantly shaped humanistic disciplines such as history, comparative literature, and anthropology, their impact on political science has been limited. The resistance to postcolonialism is strongly associated with the perpetuation of Euroc…
Beyond subalternity
Subalterns, as Ranajit Guha famously argued, resist modern states on the basis of pre-existing social solidarities and an autonomous domain of consciousness. Critics of subaltern studies have argued, however, that subaltern resistance is, in fact, deeply implicated in the symbols and discourses of domination rather than simply constituting an autonomous political domain. Might it be possible to take this criticism of subalternity seriously and ye…
Liberalism and Its Other
Liberalism is widely regarded as a modern intellectual tradition that defends the rights and freedoms of autonomous individuals. Yet, in both colonial and postcolonial contexts, liberal theorists and lawmakers have struggled to defend the rights and freedoms of political subjects whom they regard as "primitive," "backward," or "indigenous." Liberalism thus recurrently encounters its primitive other, a face-off that gives rise to a peculiar set of…
Introduction. Selves and Society in Postcolonial India
On 16 December 2012, a twenty-three year old physiotherapist was gangraped in Munirka, New Delhi by six men in a bus. Thirteen days later, she passed away in Singapore, having suffered serious brain and gastrointestinal injuries. This case snowballed into a nationwide wave of protests on not only the heinousness of this particular incident, but the widespread public patriarchy that afflicts the right of Indian women to freely access public domain…
Going Primitive
How and why did a labor union organizer from Goa, a former Naxalite student cadre from West Bengal and a Jesuit priest from Tamil Nadu end up as spokespersons for adivasi rights in contemporary Jharkhand? What caused their discourse to shift from tribal/adivasi to indigeneity? Might indigeneity be an ideology for them? To answer these questions, this paper analyzes the oral histories of three leading indigenous rights activists in Jharkhand. In t…
The Maoist Movement in Contemporary India
Additional informationNotes on contributorsUday ChandraUday Chandra is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. His research interests lie at the intersection between agrarian studies, comparative studies of state formation and resistance, postcolonial theory, political anthropology and South Asian history. His dissertation studies the historical origins and social bases of the contemporary Maoist insurgency in…
A matter of belief
Towards Adivasi Studies
Daniel J. Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta (eds), The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2011, xvii + 238 pp., $112.57 (hbk). Sanjukta Das Gupta and Raj Sekhar Basu (eds), Narratives from the Margins: Aspects of Adivasi History in India. Primus Books, New Delhi, 2012, 312 pp., INR 995. Crispin Bates and Alpa Shah (eds), Savage Attack: Tribal Insurgency in India. Social Science Press, New Delhi, 2014, …
Globalizing Citizens
As processes of globalization permeate our disparate lifeworlds, scholars of social movements are rightly asking whether and to what extent our existing theories of citizenship, claim-making, and d
Rethinking Subaltern Resistance
This special issue seeks to rethink "resistance" as a critical social science concept in the light of a range of critiques since the 1980s. The five articles in this issue draw their empirical materials from contemporary India, but their arguments have significant implications for those working on other parts of Asia and the world. The articles acknowledge the inherent ambiguities and ambivalences of subaltern resistance in the face of hegemonic …
Flaming fields and forest fires
The purpose of this article is to question the overarching notion of 'millenarianism' as well as its applicability to various 'tribal' rebellions and social movements in British India. I do so by carefully re-reading the colonial archives and secondary sources concerning the Birsaite uprising afresh in order to rethink how certain forest-dwelling groups who came to be defined as 'tribes' in colonial times actually encountered the modern state as …
Recasting Caste
Hira Singh's Recasting Caste presents the most sophisticated Marxist anthropology of caste in India to date. Singh's thesis is strikingly simple: caste, far from embodying a cultural or religious p
Primitive Accumulation and “Primitive” Subjects in Postcolonial India
In late 2008 a five-minute video clip entitled Gaon Chodab Nahin (literally, “We Shall Not Leave Our Village”) came into circulation among activists and grassroots NGOs in the forest highlands of eastern India. To those who watched and passed on the video throughout the eastern Indian states of Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa, it summed up the plight of adivasi or “tribal” populations in the region as they battled an emerging state–corporate ne…
Modernity of Slavery
Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and the Specter of Universalism
Following recent debates between Vivek Chibber and leading postcolonial theorists, I probe into what is missing in these exchanges. I focus on the figure of the 'tribal' in modern India in Ranajit Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India and Alpa Shah's In the Shadows of the State, both of which claim to offer emic perspectives on subaltern politics and history. Yet both works, despite their undeniable differences, displa…
The demands of recognition
Townsend Middleton's The Demands of Recognition is an invitation to think through the everyday dilemmas of ethnic minorities as well as the state anthropologists who certify them as 'scheduled trib
A Divided City in a Time of Pandemic
A Roundtable on Rupa Viswanath'sThe Pariah Problem
In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book,The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour c…
Two. Colonial Paternalism and the Making of the Modern Tribal Subject
Resistance As Negotiation
"Tribes" appear worldwide today as vestiges of a pre-modern past at odds with the workings of modern states. Acts of resistance and rebellion by groups designated as "tribal" have fascinated as well as perplexed administrators and scholars in South Asia and beyond. Tribal resistance and rebellion are held to be tragic yet heroic political acts by "subaltern" groups confronting omnipotent states. By contrast, this book draws on fifteen years of ar…
The curious trajectory of caste in West Bengal politics
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (13 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Anthropology (8 works) · Colonialism (8 works) · History (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works)