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Ajay Salunkhe

Mr. Ajay Salunkhe is a doctoral student in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. His doctoral research is located in the intertwined histories of photography, archaeology, and museum movement. His doctoral dissertation titled, Framing the Nation: How Museums Tell Stories of India Through Photographs, enquires into the shifting and layered relationship between museums and photographs in post-independent India. He is interested in the potential of photographs to communicate ideas and establish power relations by telling (or not telling) the story of India through her museums, as well as the dynamics of the interactions between visitors and photographs in museum space.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, his research aims to probe the institutional use of photography in the museum and curatorial practices, both in India and abroad, that contributed to the post-colonial Indian imagination, with special reference to the use of photographs in the Festival of India in the US (1985-1986).

He has several years of curatorial, exhibiting, and education experience as part of a museum’s outreach program, which has lent depth and dialogue to his research. He can be found taking long walks at any hour of the day, catching Pokémon, when he is not reading.

Sarita Sundar

Ms. Sarita Sundar’s practice and research spans heritage studies, visual culture, and design theory. She is the founder of Hanno, a heritage interpretation and design consultancy.

Ms. Sundar has a postgraduate degree in Visual Communications from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad and an M.A. in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester, UK where she was awarded the 2016 Professor Eilean Hooper-Greenhill Academic Prize. She is a visiting faculty at various design institutes: including NID, Ahmedabad; and Srishti Manipal School of Design and Technology, Bangalore. Her research ranges from studies of vernacular typography to looking at the intangible and material culture of performance practices in the temples of Valuvanad, Kerala (for which she received a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts). Her present research focuses on the cultural and design history of seats in India and will culminate in a publication in 2022.

Ms. Sundar’s Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship takes forward her multi-disciplinary research and seeks to address the lacuna of critical discourse in the discipline of design in India. By mapping the transcultural exchange of aesthetics and ideologies between India and the United States, and situating the interconnected events and dialogues, Ms. Sundar’s project looks at how these historical milestones continue to motivate and influence contemporary design, and associated fields such as curatorial practice in both countries. Furthermore, it examines the pathways followed by modernism and counter-movements like postmodernism, and their interactions with indigenous epistemology in Indian aesthetics and thought. She is also co-teaching a course, ‘Visualizing India’, at the University of Vermont.

Bhangya Bhukya

Dr. Bhangya Bhukya is a Professor of History at the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. He specializes in Modern Indian History. His research interests include community histories, the effects of power and knowledge, governmentality and dominance, the state and nationalism, intellectual histories of subaltern communities, identity politics by forest and hill people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was a Ford Foundation Fellow (2003-06) and a British Council Visiting Fellow (2010).

Dr. Bhukya did his Ph.D. from the University of Warwick, UK, and his thesis has been published as a book, Subjugated Nomads. The Lambadas under the rule of the Nizams in 2010. He published quite influential books, including The Roots of the Periphery. A history of the Deccan Gonds (2017), History of Modern Telangana (2017) and A Cultural History of Telangana (2021). He is also a public historian and activist involved in India’s Adivasi human rights movements.

Dr. Bhukya proposes to study why British colonial protectionism and post-colonial integrationism/assimilationism did not bring tangible changes in Adivasi life, particularly how these development approaches outweighed Adivasi self-rule and self-determinism; and, consequently, also their political rights. The study is theoretical in its nature, and it interrogates the philosophy, assumptions, and approaches of what is termed ‘Adivasi development’ and proposes to re-investigate what development has actually meant to Adivasis.

P.K. Yasser Arafath

Dr. P.K. Yasser Arafath is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delhi and a historian of medieval and early modern India. He was L.M. Singhi Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 2017.

Dr. Arafath received his Ph.D. from the University of Hyderabad, and his research primarily focuses on South India. He is interested in its intellectual traditions, transliterated literature, history of violence, communities in the Indian Ocean, and the cultural history of the body and hygiene in the region. He has co-edited Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction (Routledge, 2021) and The Hijab: Islam, Women and the Politics of Clothing (Simon & Schuster, 2022). Dr. Arafath won the prestigious Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer Best Published Paper Award (2020–2021) for his research article that he published in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Arafath is examining how a section of South Asian Islamic scholars shaped the gender sensibilities of the Mappila-Muslims of Malabar by engaging with multiple discourses within the region and beyond in the 19th century. His project aims to do a systematic study of gender and sexuality in Arabi-Malayalam, a transliterated textual tradition in the Indian Ocean region that entails writing Malayalam —the native tongue of Kerala —in Arabic script. This study will add to the existing body of knowledge on gendered Islam in South Asia and gender discourses in South Asian Islamic cultures in the 19th century.

Sucharita Sen

Dr. Sucharita Sen is interested in the politics of everyday life beyond the conventional epicenters of power, with her research methodologically anchored at the intersection of history and political anthropology. She completed her Ph.D. in 2022 from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Dr. Sen is a recipient of the Walter L. Arnstein prize for the Best Ph.D. Paper at the 68th annual Midwest conference on British Studies (a regional affiliate of the North American conference on British Studies), 2021, the prize for the Best Ph.D. Paper at the 2021 biennial conference of the New Zealand Historical Association, and a Certificate of Excellence from Oxford University Press (India) for being the winning contributor of the December (2021) issue of Tell Me Your Story Review. Her works have appeared in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Contemporary South Asia, Society and Culture in South Asia and Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities.

Currently, Dr. Sen is co-editing the December 2025 (special) issue of the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, and a post-conference edited volume (with Sekhar Bandyopadhyay) comprising selected papers from the ones presented at an international conference which she convened at the University of Auckland in September 2023.

Dr. Sen is working on her first monograph. The project examines, within the frameworks of affect theory and the critiques of Orientalism, a world of intimate power vis-à-vis official animosities in British India. The monograph revises her Ph.D. thesis, brings in additional materials, and rewrites the already published materials afresh. She also plans to co-convene an international conference with the support of her mentor at OSU. The conference will specifically boost Indo-U.S. collaboration in the field of South Asian Studies.

Ashutosh Kumar

Ashutosh Kumar is an Associate Professor of History at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. He earned his Ph.D. from the History Department of the University of Delhi, where he also taught from 2012 to 2014. He received South-South Exchange Program for Research on the History of Development (SEPHIS), a Government of Netherlands funded program Fellowship during his Ph.D. He was fellow at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom; Yale University, USA; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, and at Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. He is president of Indian Association for South Asian Studies (IASAS) and Chairman of Centre for Alternative Studies in Social Sciences, New Delhi.

His most recent publications include Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920’, Cambridge University Press, 2017 and ‘Girmitiyas and Global Indian Diaspora: Origins, Memories and Identities’ Cambridge University Press, 2023.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar, Dr. Kumar is exploring issue of rights of Indian indentured laborers on colonial sugar plantations during nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the letters, petitions and depositions of indentured Indian migrants with a particular emphasis on the letters they wrote in regional Indian language. His project analyses such laborers’ letters and makes the case that Indian indentured laborers were able to fight for their “rights”, natural and contractual with planters and the colonial government through petitions, in addition to being able to voice their feelings and concerns on a variety of other matters.