Gyanendra Pandey

Gyanendra Pandey, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History (D.Phil., University of Oxford, 1975); South Asian and postcolonial history; violence, citizenship and marginality; memory and history. He is the author of Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (2006); The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh: Class, Community and Nation in Northern India, 1920-1940 (rev. ed. 2002); Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001); Memory, History and the Question of Violence (1999); The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990); and numerous collaborative works and articles. The Gyanendra Pandey Omnibus, consisting of three of his books, has been published by Oxford University Press in 2008. Gyanendra Pandey was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (1970-73). He is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies project, and editor of the new Routledge book series, Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Before coming to Emory he taught at the University of Delhi and at Johns Hopkins.

Much of my research and writing has been concerned with questions of violence, citizenship and marginality. I have moved from investigating peasant risings in the course of anti-colonial nationalist movements, to Hindu-Muslim conflict, to the history of Dalit (or ex-Untouchable) communities in India and African-Americans in the USA. A 2001 book on Partition focused on the memory and history of ‘extraordinary’ violence, and how historians’ history works to produce the ‘truth’ of the violence and to elide it at the same time. Routine Violence, published by Stanford University Press in 2006, extends that inquiry by focusing on the violence of ordinary times in the making of modern political arrangements and the writing of national histories. My current research pursues these questions of routine violence, citizenship and marginality in a slightly different area, as I examine the making of the Dalit and the African American middle classes and work towards a history of the oxymoronic category of a ‘subaltern elite.’

Over the last three years, I have also been working to develop a dialogue between historians and social scientists working on the North and the South. Two international, interdisciplinary workshops on the theme of ‘Subaltern Citizens and their Histories: Investigations from India and the USA’, held at Emory in October 2006 and December 2007, and a major collection of papers to be published under the same title in 2009, are among the first results of this effort.

Curriculum Vitae