Dr. Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay
Associate Professor, Humanities & Social Sciences

Email ritajyoti(AT)iisermohali.ac.in
Phone  
Fax +91 172 2240124
Personal Page                                                               
Research Area
Urban History, Contemporary History, Political Economy, State and Democracy Studies, Infrastructure Studies

Research Focus

My earlier and ongoing research projects explore themes in informality, infrastructure technologies, urban history, Marxism, and governmentality studies in late-colonial and post-colonial India. I work on the trajectories of capitalist accumulation and urbanization in twentieth-century Calcutta, economic informality, postcolonial statecraft and its relationship with knowledge, social policy, rent and tenancy relations in South Asian cities, and mass political formation under popular sovereignty and neoliberalism.

Currently, I am working on two book projects:

1. Governing Calcutta in the Twentieth Century: Territory, Property, Mobility

2. State, Democracy, and Development in India, 1947-1967

Teaching

HSS602: Social Theory: Concepts and Debates

HSS634: Themes in Infrastructure Studies

HSS637: Reading Records

HSS642: Science and Society


Selected Publications

  • Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (2022): Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property and Political Culture in Twentieth-century Calcutta (Series: Metamorphoses of the Political), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Monograph]: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009109208
  • Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (2022): 'The Making of a Majoritarian Metropolis: Crowd Action, Public Order and Communal Zoning in Calcutta’, in Thomas Blom Hansen and Srirupa Roy (eds) Saffron Republic: Hindu Nationalism and State Power in India (Series: Metamorphoses of the Political), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 130-157: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009118873.006
  • Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Paula Banerjee and Ranabir Samaddar (eds), (2021): India’s Migrant Workers and the Pandemic, London: Routledge: https://www.routledge.com/Indias-Migrant-Workers- and-the-Pandemic/Bandyopadhyay-Banerjee-Samaddar/p/book/9781032158921
  • Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (2016): 'Institutionalizing Informality: "The Hawkers’ Question" in Postcolonial Calcutta’, Modern Asian Studies (Cambridge), 50, (2), 675-717: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/abs/institutionalizing-informality-the-hawkers-question-in-postcolonial-calcutta/8F73E390BF050976D660E8A6364DF83E