Senior Fellow

Aditya Nigam works in the broad field of social and political theory. He has published extensively on Marxism, nationalism, identity and radical politics in both English and Hindi. He is interested in cultural politics and in understanding how political subjectivities are shaped in our times. Together with some other colleagues at the CSDS, he is engaged in the exploration of the idea of ‘the contemporary’ — and its specific configuration today. As part of this engagement, he is currently working on a longer term study of ‘Capital’ from a post-Marxist perspective that attempts to interrogate its received history. This exploration increasingly comes up against the knowledge-apparatus transmitted by social science disciplines such as economics, political science and political theory, which collude in producing Capital’s claim to universality. Thus the exploration of capital’s history becomes closely tied to the other collective project — ‘Reassembling Contemporary Social Thought’ that Nigam is involved, along with two other colleagues, Prathama Banerjee and Rakesh Pandey.

Nigam is author of The Insurrection of Little Selves: Crisis of Secular-nationalism in India, Oxford University Press 2006), Power and Contestation: India Since 1989, and with Nivedita Menon, Zed Books, London 2007), After Utopia: Modernity and Socialism in the Postcolony, (Viva Books, Delhi, 2010) and Desire Named Development (Penguin Books, Delhi, 2011),

Nigam has also been associated with a group of South Asian scholars from Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India, working around the idea of 'the postnational condition'. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford in 1998, Visiting Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University in 2006 and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster in 2009. He was academic resident at the Bellagio Center in 2011.