Senior Fellow

Shail Mayaram has explored subaltern perspectives on state and sovereignty, mobilities and identities in relation to peasant, pastoral and “tribal” peoples. As a theorist of violence she has worked on inter-ethnic relations in Asian cities including dimensions of conflict, coexistence and conviviality. Her intellectual engagement has also been in the larger field of religion and politics, the question of conversion, transnational religious movements and political theologies with implications for democracy and secularism. Her current interests are in writing a history of cosmopolitanism and in the project of swaraj in ideas and its implications for decolonizing knowledge.

Publications include Against History, Against State: Counterperspectives from the Margins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); coauthored with Ashis Nandy, Shikha Trivedi, Achyut Yagnik, Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and the Fear of Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); coedited with Ajay Skaria and MSS Pandian, Subaltern Studies: Muslims, Dalits and the fabrications of history vol 12 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005); edited, The Other Global City (New York and London: Routledge, 2009) and Philosophy as Samvada and Svaraja: Dialogical Meditations on Daya Krishna and Ramchandra Gandhi (Shimla and Delhi: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, forthcoming). A current book project is titled, Nationalism in the time of Imperial Terror: From the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana.