About
Citing widespread violence against minority groups, executive interference in the judiciary, and the strategic use of punitive state forces against activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens, Freedom House, a U.S-based non-profit downgraded India’s status from “free” to “partly-free” in 2020.1 Observers, including the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 2021, have voiced concerns about press freedom in India and the use of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act to crush dissent. Within India, concerned citizens, civil rights activists and lawyers, and university students have been at the forefront of struggles against injustice. Across the world, the rise of authoritarian leaders and the assertions of majoritarian movements threaten to undo hard-fought victories on questions of political and social justice. Tightening constraints on dissent in the name of the nation in India and elsewhere demand further reflection.
‘Power, Inequality, Dissent’ is a two-year event series at the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) that features perspectives on new and re-tooled ways in which citizens are confronting power in India. Through an interdisciplinary approach, it seeks to generate insight into the myriad responses of individuals and of collectives to asymmetrical power relations. This set of conversations addresses new developments that are reshaping India’s democracy, such as new axes of caste- and religion-based oppression, the place of sexual minorities, governmental efforts to remake citizenship, struggles over rights in land, labor rights, and environmental protection. Along the way, the project seeks to highlight how dissent in all of its myriad forms generates new forms of cultural politics and intimacies.
Divya Cherian (Associate Professor, History) and Harini Kumar (Postdoctoral Research Associate, History/Chadha Center for Global India) are co-organizing this project with the support from the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India. South Asianist graduate students were important participants in envisioning this project. Working with them, we have cast a wide net in our conceptualization of the theme anchoring the two-year project. Our goal is for these events to facilitate relationships between members of the Princeton community and institutions, scholars, and artists in India and its diaspora. Through talks, roundtable discussions, and arts-centric events, we hope to bring developments in India in dialogue with related shifts elsewhere in the world.
1 “India went from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’ in 2020: Freedom House,” Al-Jazeera, (accessed 3/4/2021)


Bios

Divya Cherian
Divya Cherian is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Princeton. She is an affiliate of the South Asian Studies Program and the Chadha Center for Global India at Princeton. Divya is a historian of pre-colonial, early modern South Asia whose research centers forms of exclusion, oppression, and marginalization along axes of caste and gender. Her book, Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023 / New Delhi: Navayana, 2023), explores the role of merchants in re-shaping the pre-colonial caste order of western India in the eighteenth century. Her writings about the pre-colonial western Indian region of Rajasthan also include an exploration of caste and space in Vaishnav devotional communities, the domain of the popular occult and its relationship with state power, and sexual personhood as reflected in the regulation of women’s sexual and reproductive agency. She is now working on her next project, which is a history of caste, sexuality, and the occult in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South Asia.

Harini Kumar
Harini Kumar is a postdoctoral research associate at the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India and the Department of History. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on Islam and Muslim societies in contemporary India. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of lived religion, kinship, gender, the built environment, and migration and mobility. Her current book project, “Formations of Tamil Islam: Belonging, Place, and Historical Consciousness in South India,” examines the lived experience of Muslims in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu within the broader context of Hindu nationalism. At the same time, this research asks how we can understand contemporary Muslim life outside the shadow of a Hindu majoritarian and nationalist discourse. Harini received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2022. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and by several programs at the University of Chicago and Princeton University.
Acknowledgments
Adhitya Dhanapal, Jiya Pandya, and Neel Thakkar, graduate students in the History Department, laid out the original vision for this project in 2020-21. Professor Gyan Prakash (History) was generous with his time, energy, and advice. Professors Ben Baer (Comparative Literature) and Michael Laffan (History) provided valuable support.
The Chadha Center for Global India generously supported this project with funds and administrative logistics. For this we are deeply grateful to the Center’s Director, Professor Anu Ramaswami (Civil & Environmental Engineering/Environmental Studies) as well as to its consecutive Center Managers, Ipshita Sengupta and Rachna Kalra. The History Department, particularly its Chair Angela Creager and Department Manager Judy Hanson, gave us valuable advice and enthusiastic support. Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) staff, especially Sam Evans of the Program in South Asian Studies, were indispensable to the successful realization of this project. Kelly Lin-Kremer helped set up our website.