AY 2018-19 Steven Wisch Graduate Student Fellowship Awardees

Center for South Asia is proud to announce the recipients of the Steven Wisch Graduate Fellowship in South Asian Studies for AY 2018-19. We have been able to give two awards and the recipients are:

Anubha Anushree, Graduate Student in History, Nominated by Professor Robert Crews, History.

Blending insights from History and Anthropology, Anubha proposes to understand the exercise of colonial power in India as a “moral” enterprise. Critical of approaches that treat bureaucracy as “neutral” or “apolitical,” Anubha has developed a focus on the “racial morality” of the “exemplar-bureaucrat,” which she investigates by looking at the career trajectories of a group of British officials, from their recruitment in England to their formulation of policies and engagement with Indian interlocutors. Her aim is to understand how colonial power came to be rooted in what she calls “moral pedagogy and perfectionism.” She is also interested in examining the emergence and deployment of a racial vocabulary within bureaucratic practice, especially in connection with investigations focused on “corruption” and controversies over “transparency.” She focuses on the intellectual history of the colonial state, the emergence of nationalism in South Asia, and subaltern studies. She is also interested in the emergence of literary and linguistic cultures in late nineteenth century colonial India.

Madihah Akhter, Graduate Student in History, Nominated by Professor Priya Satia, History.

Madihah's doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled, "In Her Own Right: Sovereignty and Gender in Princely Bhopal, 1901-1926," explores the mutual dependencies and contestations of sovereignty between princely rulers and imperial administrators in the twentieth century. Specifically, she excavates the possibilities of princely sovereignty in Bhopal under the direction of its ruler, Sultan Jahan Begum (r. 1901-1926). Bhopal, located in central India, was the only princely state under female rule in the twentieth century and was the second largest Muslim princely state in India. In this project, she interrogates the conceptual and practical articulations of "in her own right" through gendered space, history writing, anticolonialism, symbolism and succession. Her dissertation speaks to varied approaches, specifically political theory on early modern and modern sovereignty in South Asia, feminist analysis of performance and embodied sovereignties, and postcolonial scholarship on anticolonialism and nationalism.

Congratulations, Madihah and Anubha!