Ravi Sundaram’s work rests at the intersection of the postcolonial city and contemporary media experiences. As media technology and urban life have intermingled in the postcolonial world, new challenges have emerged for contemporary cultural theory. Sundaram’s work has looked at the phenomenon that he calls ‘pirate modernity’, an illicit form of urbanism that draws from media and technological infrastructures of the postcolonial city. Sundaram uses this location to comment on the twentieth century modernist archive, and also the fragile edifice of representation – in design, the political, governmental power and urbanism. His essays have been translated into various languages in India, Asia and Europe. Sundaram’s current research looks at urban fear after media modernity.

Ravi Sundaram was one of the initiators of the Sarai programme of the CSDS which he co-directs with his colleague Ravi Vasudevan. In Sarai, he worked with the research project Publics and Practices in the History of the Present, which examined the emerging inter-media junctions in Indian cities. In 2003, he organised City One: South Asian Conference on the Urban Experience in Delhi, and in 2005 he co-organised (along with Jeebesh Bagchi and Lawrence Liang) Contested Commons/Trespassing Publics: A Conference on Inequalities, Conflicts and Intellectual Property also in Delhi. Sundaram has co-edited the critically acclaimed series: the Sarai Readers: The Public Domain (2001), The Cities of Everyday Life, (2002), Shaping Technologies (2003), Crisis Media (2004) and Turbulence (2006).

Sundaram recently published Pirate Modernity: Media Urbanism in Delhi (2009) (Routledge, London and Delhi), and is finishing two edited volumes, No Limits: Media Studies from India and Delhi’s Twentieth Century, both from Oxford University Press.

Sundaram has taught in universities in India and the United States. He is a Visiting Faculty at the Department of Urban Design, School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi.


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