Gyanendra Pandey

Gyanendra Pandey, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History (B.A., University of Delhi, 1969; D.Phil., Oxford University, 1975); South Asian and postcolonial history; violence, citizenship and marginality. 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 many collaborative works and articles. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (1970-73). 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 a moment of genocidal violence and how we write about it: how history and memory interact, what counts as evidence, and how historians’ history works to produce the ‘truth’ of the violence of 1947 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 African-American middle classes and work towards a history of the oxymoronic category of a ‘subaltern elite.’

Curriculum Vitae