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Research and Publications

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Articles/chapters

  • Prasad, R. “Railway bookselling and the politics of print in India: The case of A. H. Wheeler.” Book History, 24: 1 (Spring 2021): 115-145.
  • Prasad, R. “Press freedom and colonial governance in India, 1780-1823,” Modern Asian Studies (forthcoming, 2020)
  • Prasad, R. “National Necessity’ and ‘Patriotic Duty’: Railway Publicity in World War II India.” In M. Crowley & S. Dawson (Eds.), Home Fronts – Britain and the Empire at War, 1939–45 (Boydell & Brewer, 2017)
  • Prasad, Ritika. “Railways in Colonial South Asia,” Mobility in History, 6:1 (Fall 2014)
  • Prasad, Ritika. “Women, Railways and Respectability in Colonial India,” in Jason Coy, Ben Marschke, Jared Poley, and Claudia Verhoeven, eds, Kinship Community, and Self: Essays in Honor of David Warren Sabean (Berghahn Books, 2014)
  • Prasad, Ritika “‘Time-Sense”: Railways and Temporality in Colonial India.” Modern Asian Studies, volume 47: 4, July 2013: 1252-82 (Also  available on MAS first-view, November 2012)
  • Prasad, Ritika, “Smoke and Mirrors: Women and Railway Travel in Colonial South Asia.” South Asian History and Culture, 3:1, January 2012: 26-46.

Research Interests:

  • South Asian history; colonial and imperial history, nationalism and decolonization;
  • Subaltern history; postcolonial theory; Alltagsgeschichte
  • Social history, history of technology; technology and society
  • Railway history
  • Print culture

Current Research

My current book project Imprimatur, Mediator, and Adversary: Press, Public and State in India, 1780-2016 examines the long-term triangular relationship between newspaper press, the colonial and postcolonial state, and a broader public as it has developed in India over two centuries. Instead of structuring state–press relations through the dichotomies of power versus freedom and/or surveillance versus sedition, it imagines it as one in which newspapers served simultaneously as imprimaturs, mediators, and adversaries in relation to the state. Coercive the colonial state undoubtedly was; however, precisely because of its unrepresentative, top-heavy and remote nature, it also relied extensively – if not exclusively – on newspapers for some of its most urgent public needs: whether of representing itself as a legitimate sovereign power in India, of securing favourable reception for its endless stream of interventions, or of accessing enough local information to determine what administrative imperatives would drive its policy decisions. Attuned to such vulnerabilities and needs, journalists patently recognized their necessity to a colonial apparatus and the negotiating power that it engendered; however, they remained cognizant of the wide range of executive powers that the state still held over them. It was in this nebulous, uneven, and rapidly shifting landscape that the practical, everyday, relationship between state and press was negotiated, through a series of transactions that recognized the institutional power and constraints of both. As this book explores, many of the structures of modern governmentality and of its relationship with the modern press in India were produced within this thrust and parry, in which power could be monopolized by neither side, and in which the very mechanisms of regulation, control, and surveillance available to the state were deployed by journalists to recalibrate the relationship, whether in terms of the minutiae of their profession – from postage to subsidies – or in terms of their ideological claims to public authority.

Courses Taught

  • HIST 6693: Graduate Historiography and Methodology
  • Hist 4797: Honors Methods and Practice: “History from Below”
  • History 4600: Fiction in History
  • Hist 4600: Islam in South Asia
  • Hist 4600: Imperialism and National Resistance
  • Hist 4002-5001: From Colony to Nation: Empire and Decolonization in South Asia
  • Hist 3168: Mohandas Gandhi and and Dissent in the Modern World
  • HIST 3002: British Imperialism in India: Empire, Nation,  & the Making of Modern South Asia
  • Hist 2600 (2100): Literary Cultures in Britain and India in an Age of Empire
  • LBST: 2102-202: Religion and Society in South Asia
  • LBST: 2102-202:Imperial “Encounters”: Colonialism and Nationalism in the Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries

Education
Ph.D., History (South Asia): University of California, Los Angeles, 2009
M.A., Modern History: Magdalen College, University of Oxford, 2001
B.A., History: St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, 1997