Ajay Skaria

he/him/his

[email protected]

612-624-7565

History

924 Heller Hall

271 19th Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Collegiate Affiliation

History

Educational Background & Specialties
Publications

Educational Background & Specialties

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Educational Background

PhD: History, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1992
MA: Medieval Indian History, Maharaja Sayajirao University, 1988

Specialties

intellectual/conceptual/philosophical history
Democracies and the minor
19th- and 20th-century caste politics
19th- and 20th-century Hinduism
Gandhi
Ambedkar
19th- and 20th-century adivasi religious movements
Historical theory/political theory
Academic Freedom

Publications

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Publications

(2025). "Gaza and the Unsettling Equality of Academic Freedom.”. Critical Times , 8.2.
(2025). “Who is Gandhi’s Neighbor?” In Vinay Lal (ed.). Truth and Nonviolence in Post-Truth Times: Mohandas Gandhi Today,.
(2025). “The Part of the Indigenous: Adivasis and the Subaltern Intimation of Freedom” In Saurabh Dube and Ishita Dube (eds.),. Handbook of Subalterns Across History. .
(2024). “Presentism? Democracy, the Historical, the Genealogical, and the Historial.” [Response to Perspectives column by AHR President James Sweet]. CSSAAME Borderlines. .
(2023). “Ambedkar and the Caste Machine.” . In Vinay Lal, India and its Intellectual Traditions.
(2022). “The Subaltern and the Minor: for Qadri Ismail". Critical Times, Vol 5, No. 3.
(2022). “Non-willing Freedom: Thinking Freedom with Gandhi” . Cultural Critique Online.
(2022). “‘English Rule without the Englishman’: citizenship, subalternity and Gandhi's 'Reader.'” In Rajeev Bhargava (editor). Politics, Ethics and the Self: Reading Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj.
(2021). "Thinking Freedom with Gandhi." In Saurabh Dube, Sanjay Seth, and Ajay Skaria (editors) . Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Global South: Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Anthropocene.
(2021). “Why Hindutva Is a Racist Supremacism – Not Merely Communalism or Majoritarianism” . TheWire, Sep 10, 2021.
(2021). “Democracy, the limits of rage, and the meaning of courage: reflecting with Gandhi” . Australian Broadcasting Corporation, January 13, 2021 [Outlook India, January 1, 2021].
(2020). “What Gandhi’s racism tells us about anti-racist politics today” . TheWire, July 14, 2020.
(2017). ‘The Opening and Obscuring of Nonwilling Freedom.’ [response essay in “Book Forum” on Unconditional Equality]. , Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 25, Issue 4.
(2016). Unconditional Equality: Gandhi's Religion of Resistance. University of Mnnesota Press.
(2015). "Ambedkar, Marx and the Buddhist Question". South Asia, Vol. 38, no. 3, September.
(2015). "Remembering Chris Bayly". Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. L, no. 21 (May 23).
(2014). "Gandhi's Radical Conservatism". Seminar, 662 (October) .
(2014). "Questions of Hurt: On the Wendy Doniger Controversy". Economic and Political Weekly, , Vol - XLIX No. 40, October 04.
(2014 ). "'Can the Dalit articulate a universal position?': the intellectual, the social, and the writing of history". Social History, , Vol. 30, Issue 3.
(2011). "Relinquishing Republican Democracy: Gandhi’s Ramarajya". Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2, 203-229.
(2010). “˜The strange violence of satyagraha: Gandhi, Itihaas, and History’, in Manu Bhagavan (ed.). Heterotopias: Nationalism and the Possibility of History in South Asia, .
(2010). Living by Dying’, in Anand Pandian and Daud Ali (editors). Genealogies of Virtue: Ethical Practice in South Asia.
(2009). “˜The project of provincializing Europe: Reading Dipesh Chakrabarty’. Economic and Political Weekly, , Vol. 44, No. 14..
(2009). ““˜No politics without religion:’ of secularism and Gandhi“, in Vinay Lal (ed.),. Political Hinduism: The religious imagination in public spheres.
(2006). Only one word, properly altered: Gandhi and the question of the prostitute. Economic and Political Weekly, reprinted in Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2.
(2005). Subaltern Studies, Vol. XII. Delhi: Permanent Black. Edited with Shail Mayaram and M.S.S. Pandian.
(2002). Special Issue: National Identities. . "The Local Life of Nationhood." Taylor and Francis. Edited with Alon Confino. .
(2002). "Gandhi’s politics: liberalism and the question of the ashram". South Atlantic Quarterly, 101:4 (Fall).
(1999). Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
(1999). "Some Aporias of History: Time, Truth and Play in Dangs, India." . Economic and Political Weekly., , Vol 34, No 15. , 897-904.
(1998). “Timber conservancy, desiccationism, and scientific forestry: the Dangs, 1840s-1920s.” In Richard Grove, Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan (eds.) . Nature and the Orient: environmental history of south and southeast Asia.
(1998). “Being jangli: the politics of wildness.” . Studies in History, 14, 2, n.s.; reprinted 2003 (2005 pb.) in P.J. Marshall (ed.) The eighteenth century, .
(1997). “Women, witchcraft and gratuitous violence in colonial western India” . Past and Present, No. 155.
(1997). “Shades of wildness: tribe, caste and gender in western India.”. Journal of Asian Studies., 56(3).
(1996). "Writing, orality and power in the Dangs, Western India, 1800s-1920s." In Dipesh Chakrabarty and Shahid Amin (eds.),. Subaltern Studies, Vol. IX.