Specialist in Intellectual History and Indian Politics

Sudipta Kaviraj is a specialist in intellectual history and Indian politics, and is a professor at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. He works in two fields of intellectual history—Indian social and political thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, and modern Indian literature and cultural production. His other areas of interest and research include the historical sociology of the Indian state, and some aspects of Western social theory.

Prior to joining Columbia University, Kaviraj taught at the Department of Political Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has also taught political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and was the Agatha Harrison Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He is a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective as well.

He has authored The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India(1995) and The Imaginary Institution of India (2010). His edited works are Politics in India (1999) and Civil Society: History and Possibilities, with Sunil Khilnani (2001).

Kaviraj held the Rajni Kothari Chair at the CSDS from May to July 2008 and delivered the annual Rajni Kothari Chair lecture ‘On the Distinctiveness of Indian Democracy: Reading Indian Democracy through Tocqueville’ on 31 July 2008.