Dr. Mridu Rai

Lecturer in Indian Studies

Research Interests

Mridu Rai was arrived in TCD following appointments at Yale, Tufts and Bowdoin College in the USA. She is a specialist in the history of south Asia and her current research focuses on questions of caste and violence in the context of new ideas about community, territory and nation in the north of modern India. This will lead to a new monograph, provisionally entitled Geographies of Justice: Caste and Violence in Colonial North India, which she hopes to complete by 2012. Dr. Rai talks about her work here (external).

Select Publications
Books

• Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights and the History of Kashmir (co-published by (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP; Delhi: Permanent Black; London: Hurst, 2004), pp. 320.

Articles

• ‘Making a part inalienable: folding Kashmir into India’s Imagination’, in Sanjay Kak (ed.), Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir (New Delhi: Penguin, 2011, in press)
• ‘A Hindu kingdom on the colonial periphery: forging state legitimacy in late-nineteenth-century Kashmir”, in Sameetah Agha and Elizabeth Kolsky (eds), The Fringes of Empire (New Delhi: OUP, 2009), pp. 115-36.
• ‘To Tear the Mask Off the Face of the Past’: Archaeology and Political Protest in Jammu and Kashmir’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 46(3), 2009, pp. 401-26.
• ‘Jinnah and the demise of a Hindu politician’, History Workshop Journal, 62(1) (2006), pp. 232-40.

Teaching and Supervision

Dr Rai offers modules at all levels on the history of south Asia, commencing at Freshman level with introductory lectures to the history, art and culture of the region. At the Sophister she delivers a List 1 module on ‘South Asia since 1947: The Making of Postcolonial Societies’ and contributes to classes on historiography. She is keen to supervise research students on most aspects of the history of modern south Asia.

Dr. Rai on the TCD Research Support System

Contact Details

Room 3120
Department of History
Trinity College
Dublin 2.

Telephone: +353 1 896 2593
Fax: +353 1 896 3995
Email: raim@tcd.ie