About Uday Chandra
Uday Chandra is a public intellectual whose work moves between political anthropology, social history, and contemporary life.
Uday Chandra is a public intellectual whose work moves between political anthropology, social history, and contemporary life.
He is interested in how power is lived and negotiated in everyday struggles,
social relationships, inherited memories, and moral assertions.
His writing ranges across democracy state power, and social movements: religion, language, caste and tribe; and the changing worlds of modern South Asia. It is grounded in long periods of archival and ethnographic research, especially in eastern India, while staying attentive to the wider Inter-Asian and Indian Ocean worlds.
His first monograph, Resistance as Negotiation: Making States and Tribes in the Margins of Modern India (Stanford University Press, 2024) grew out of over 15 years of fieldwork in Jharkhand. The book rethinks resistance as an intimate, often contradictory, process by which marginalised groups and modern states shape one another.
After teaching for a decade at Georgetown University in Qatar, Uday is now Visiting Professor of Political Science at Ashoka University. His teaching and writing bring the study of politics into conversation with anthropology, history and social theory.
Thinking in Place grows from a desire to bring these habits of inquiry to wider public world. It makes room for conversation, writing, and travel without letting complexity at the mercy of a distant and perfomative expertise.
Uday lives and works in Gurgaon, India. He writes for both scholarly and public audiences, teaches courses on how to make better sense of politics and society, and convenes workshops and projects on recurring themes that stand out in a fast-changing world.
Research and teaching at the intersection of politics, anthropology and history.
Democracy, state power, caste, tribe, modern South Asia.
Engaged in writing, teaching, and conversations.
Writing & Public Life
Archives & Ethnography
Modern South Asia
Religion, Language & Caste
State, Society & Movements
Power & Everyday Life
Making States and Tribes in the Margins of Modern India
Stanford University Press, 2024
Based on more than 15 years of fieldwork in Jharkhand, this monograph
rethinks resistance as an intimate, often contradictory process by which
marginalised groups and modern states shape one another.
A pathbreaking study that brings together archival depth and ethnographic intimacy to rethink the making of the modern state from the margins.
— Stanford University Press