Aniket De

Aniket De is a historian of modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean. His work, broadly speaking, has critically addressed global debates on race, sovereignty, federalism, and border-making from a South Asian and anti-colonial perspective.

De’s first book, The Boundary of Laughter: Popular Performances across Borders in South Asia (Oxford University Press, 2021), draws on archival research as well as ethnographic fieldwork to study a popular theater form called Gambhira, performed by both Hindus and Muslims in regions of both sides of what is today the India-Bangladesh border. The book, which originated as his undergraduate thesis, analyzes how people on both sides of the border grappled with the trauma of Partition through performances of humor, laughter, and parody, that created what he calls “shared cultural spaces” across borders drawn by the colonial and post-colonial states who governed the region. The book received honorable mention in the American Folklore Society ‘s 2022 Wayland D. Hand Prize for the best book in Folklore and History, was longlisted for the inaugural 2022 Karwaan Prize for the best book in Indian History, and was the basis for a handmade artist book by the visual artist Tammy Nguyen.

In his current project, De continues to explore the accommodation of cultural and political difference in the broader spatial framework of the Indian Ocean. He maps the hitherto unnoticed connections between race, sovereignty, and structures of federalism in British India, showing that imperial administrators who racially segregated the city of Johannesburg later devised the “federal” structure of British India from 1919 to 1935, keeping financial and military power in white hands while transferring the burden of administration to Indians in provincial administrations. At the same time, he analyzes how anticolonial federalist politics—expressed in vernacular pamphlets, cartoons, and literary and artistic works— challenged this racial logic of governance and developed competing models of sharing sovereignty across cultural differences. These two lineages of federalism, racial-imperial and anticolonial, he shows, continued after decolonization, transforming a colonial relation of racial inequity to a post-colonial relationship of constitutional inequity between the center and the provinces. The project has been supported by major fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Center for European Studies at Harvard.

Born and raised in Howrah, India, and trained in South Asian and Indian Ocean History at Tufts (BA ’16) and Harvard (Ph.D., ’24), De runs collaborative historical projects in vernacular languages. His latest collaborative publication is a volume edited with Semanti Ghosh, Deshbandhu: Samakale, Kalantare [Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das in His Times and Ours] (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 2023), an edited volume of fresh critical perspectives on a major South Asian federalist politician and thinker, along with a compilation of vernacular archival materials and historical essays.