Neel Thakkar

Neel Thakkar is an historian of modern South Asia with interests in economic, environmental, and political history, and Adivasi (‘Indigenous’) Studies. His dissertation argued that twentieth-century development was an avenue for creative projects of alternative world-making. Through a focus on the Chota Nagpur plateau, a mineral-rich region in eastern India that bore the brunt of India’s experiment with economic planning, his work demonstrates that elites and subalterns alike engaged with the concept of development to theorize, organize around, and contest competing visions of modernity. Prior to joining the Program in Agrarian Studies, Neel studied at Princeton University and at Stanford University. Neel has also published on the history of ‘developmentalism’ in colonial Africa, and remains interested in the thematic linkages between South Asia and the globe around questions of empire and decolonization, capitalism and development, and indigeneity.