Fellow

Aditya Nigam works in the broad field of social and political theory and is the Joint Director of the Programme in Social and Political Theory at the CSDS. He is particularly interested in cultural politics and is engaged in attempting to understand political practices beyond limits of ‘political science’. He has published regularly on questions of nationalism, identity and radical politics in both English and Hindi. His work looks at the contemporary experience of capitalism and globalization in the postcolonial world, its relationship to new experiences of time and space, and the ways in which political subjectivities are constituted in the present. He is currently working on a longer term project of looking at a counter-history of capitalism from a post-Marxist perspective. Another aspect of Nigam’s interests lies in a fresh engagement with aspects of Indian political and social thought and its relationship to the experience of modernity.

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 with Nivedita Menon, Zed Books London) and After Utopia: Modernity and Socialism in the Postcolony (Viva Books, Delhi). His next book A Desire Named Development (forthcoming, Penguin), is in press. 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 and Visiting Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University in 2006. He was also Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster in 2009.