Overview
I am a historian of modern India and the British Empire, with an investment in women’s studies, visual studies, and digital humanities. My interdisciplinary research pushes the limits of the historical discipline by bringing together the study of the image and the textual archive to challenge existing scholarly understandings of colonial and post-colonial political culture. Prior to receiving my Ph.D. at Duke, I received post graduate degrees in Visual Studies and Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University and University of Delhi, respectively.
In Fall 2024, I will be teaching a course titled "Rise and Fall of the British Empire" in the Department of History at Duke.
My doctoral dissertation titled, 'Disobedient Women in a Consumer City: Picturing Swadeshi Culture in Interwar Bombay' studies the significant role of Bombay women's anticolonial work and gender ideologies in promoting the spread of 'swadeshi' consumerism among the urban middle class during the Civil Disobedience Movement in India. I define swadeshi as a form of economic nationalism centered around boycott of foreign goods and politically driven consumer culture. In combination with text based archives, such as official reports, letters, pamphlets, and archival papers of various political and merchant associations, my research draws from a wide range of image and sound-based sources such as print advertisements, photographs, and bazaar art, records of songs and verses. Analyzing an array of evidence, my dissertation reconstructs the distinct milieu and rich palette of Bombay streets, where differing sociopolitical and economic forces of British imperialism, mercantile capitalism, and anticolonialism, came together to contingently act upon each other and contributed towards renovating gender, caste, and class relations.
Currently, I am also working on a collaborative public history project titled 'Words of Light on the Streets of Disobedience in Bombay' in collaboration with Sumathi Ramaswamy. Developed with New Delhi based Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, this project draws on a collection of documentary photographs compiled in a historical album named Collections of Photographs of Old Congress Party— K.L. Nursey. A video preview of this project is available here. As part of this project, I have published a co-authored peer reviewed journal article ‘Light Writing on the Lathi Raj, Bombay 1930-31’ in the History of Photography.
I have also contributed a chapter titled 'Interrogating 'Credible Chhattisgarh': Photography and the Construction of a New Indian State' to the edited book Photography in India: From Archives to Contemporary Practice (2020). This book is extensively used as a teaching resource in universities for photography studies in the UK and India.
In addition to academic publications, I have also produced public scholarship on a variety of topics related to photographic practice in India, from the Nineteenth Century to the present, through my contributions to ASAP Art, a platform featuring critical perspectives on lens-based practices from South Asia.
Learn more at www.avratibhatnagar.com.