Radha Kumar
Assistant Professor, History
Degree
Ph.D., Princeton University, 2015
Specialties
Modern South Asia: policing and sovereignty, legal history, colonial and post-colonial politics
Courses
HST 122 Global History: 1750 to the present
HST 328 Ancient and Medieval India
HST 329 Making of Modern India
HST 300 Religion in South Asian Politics
HST 300 Caste & Inequality in Modern India
HST 401 (Undergraduate Research Seminar) The Colonial City
Biography
I am a historian of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, with
a research focus on the southern, Tamil-speaking regions of the subcontinent. My
current project uses the lens of policing to explore everyday governance,
(re)production of colonial knowledge in the management of dispersed rural
populations, and the deployment of routine violence under the British as well
as early postcolonial governments. I am working on a book manuscript, titled Police, Politics, and the Everyday State in
South India, 1900-1975, which will examine policing not simply as state
authority exercised on passive populations, but also as spatial practice that
blurs the line between state and society, to argue that policing was
simultaneously constitutive of the everyday authority of the state and of
popular politics.
Publications
“Policing Everyday
Life: The FIR in the Tamil Countryside, c. 1900-1950,” Indian Economic and
Social History Review, 54, 3, 2017, pp. 1-27.
“Seeing Like a
Policeman: Everyday Violence in British India, c. 1900-1950,” in Dwyer,
Nettelbeck and Ryan eds Violence,
Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World, Cambridge Imperial and
Post-colonial Studies, Palgrave Macmillan. (forthcoming).