University of Washington Archives

Sunila Kale

Prof. Sunila S. Kale is associate professor of international studies at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on Indian and South Asian politics, energy studies, the political economy of development, and the history of capitalism. She is the author of Electrifying India (Stanford, 2014), Mapping Power (OUP, 2018), and “Rural Land Dispossession in China and India” (Journal of Peasant Studies, 2020). She completed her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from the University of Texas.

In 2020, India’s Railway Ministry announced that the railways would resurrect the practice of selling chai (tea) to its millions of customers the old-fashioned way, in kulhads, the small mud-clay cups that are meant to be used once and discarded. Prof. Kale’s Fulbright research asks whether and how policies such as the kulhad program support and reproduce modes of informal, artisanal work that persist despite developmental ideologies that have long predicted their demise. In her project, she is focusing on small-scale, labor-intensive informal production in urban India by looking at the work of traditional potters, or kumbhars, in western India.

Christian Novetzke

Prof. Christian Novetzke received a BA from Macalester College, an MTS from Harvard University, and a PhD from Columbia University. Prof. Novetzke is Professor of South Asia Studies, Religious Studies, and Global Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is also Professor of the Comparative History of Ideas at UW. Prof. Novetzke’s books include The Quotidian Revolution (Columbia University Press 2016) and Religion and Public Memory (Columbia University Press 2008). He is also the co-author (with Andy Rotman and William Elison) of Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (Harvard University Press 2016) and co-editor (with Jack Hawley and Swapna Sharma) Of Bhakti and Power (University of Washington Press 2019). Among his awards, Prof. Novetzke was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018 and a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow in 2013. His current projects include a book on yoga as political theory and practice with co-author Sunila S. Kale (under contract at Columbia University Press) and a book on the thought of Savitribai Phule, for which he was awarded the current Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.

Savitribai Phule was born into an impoverished subaltern caste of Shudra agricultural workers in India in 1831. She became one of the first Shudra women in India to receive an education. She authored two books of political poetry in Marathi, each articulating her powerful vision for social justice and her fight against caste patriarchy. Her ideas about religion, caste, gender, and power made her one of the most important critical thinkers in Indian history. However, Savitribai Phule is hardly known outside of India. With Fulbright-Nehru’s support Prof. Novetzke hopes to complete his research on a book on the critical thought of Savitribai Phule.

Manish Chalana

Dr. Manish Chalana, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington, with adjunct appointments in Architecture and Landscape Architecture in the College of Built Environments. He is also an affiliate of the South Asia Center in the Jackson School of International Studies (JSIS). His work engages with urban planning through the lenses of historic preservation, international planning and development, and equity and social justice. He is also the director of the Graduate Certificate in Historic Preservation and co-directs the Center for Preservation and Adaptive Reuse (CPAR) which strives to connect the academia to the practice of historic preservation. Additionally, he is the membership chair of the National Council for Preservation Education (NCPE). Dr. Chalana’s scholarly contributions have been substantial, including two co-edited volumes. The first, titled Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia (with Jeffrey Hou, Hong Kong University Press, 2016), goes beyond the mainstream discourse in exploring the complexities of urbanism in Asian cities. The second volume, Heritage Conservation in Postcolonial India: Approaches and Challenges (with Ashima Krishna, Routledge, 2021), critically examines heritage conservation in the context of India’s postcolonial society. Additionally, he has published on topics of urban planning and historic preservation in a variety of academic journals, including the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of Heritage Stewardship, Planning Perspectives, Journal of Planning History, and Journal of the American Planning Association.

Dr. Chalana’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the state of historic preservation, or “heritage conservation”, in India, focusing on its inclusivity and equity aspects. The project is primarily examining the representation of sites associated with underrepresented communities in the historical record and is assessing their management and interpretation on the ground. Additionally, the project is investigating the types of histories and memories that may have been lost for sites where physical evidence no longer exists. The study’s emphasis is on Dalits, non-elite Muslims, Sikhs, women, and non-binary groups.

Kaya Mallick

Kaya Mallick is an anthropologist of religion who studies the interrelation between yoga and gender. She holds an MA in South Asia studies from the University of Washington, where she was a two-time Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow in Hindi/ Urdu. She is also a 200-hour Registered Yoga Teacher (200-RYT) and creator of The Woke Yogi, a yoga lifestyle blog. Kaya’s scholarship largely centers around female practitioners of the Hindu ascetic traditions of yoga and tantra, but she is also currently researching the role of yoga in hyper-masculine nationalist iconographies.

Kaya is a devout scholar, teacher, and practitioner of yoga who spends much of her free time on her mat. She has been teaching vinyasa and yin-style yoga for six years, and her classes seek to integrate the psychosomatic practice of modern postural yoga with the tradition’s rich philosophical lineage.

Before discovering yoga, Kaya was primarily a playwright whose plays were staged across the U.S. and India. While earning her BFA, she discovered an inherent theatricality in the Hindu mythological texts and thus she began weaving their tales into her own. The resulting research ultimately inspired her transition from dramaturgy to sociocultural anthropology. However, despite her disciplinary shift, Kaya continues to tell stories – on the stage and in the yoga studio.

With the Fulbright-Nehru research grant, Kaya is conducting an ethnography of Hindu women who lead ascetic lifestyles (sādhvīs/saṃnyāsasinīs/yoginīs). Through participant observations and interviews, she is studying how and why Hindu women practice asceticism in uniquely gendered ways and how their ascetic practices impact their lives both materially and metaphysically.