SASC Colloquium: Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900-1975, Radha Kumar

Radha Kumar is a historian of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. Her first book, Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900-1975 (Cornell University Press, 2021), drew on previously unexplored police records to examine the close ties between police and caste authority that were displayed at every day as well as exceptional moments through much of the twentieth century in the Tamil countryside.
She has commenced work on a second project on the Kaveri river dispute in southern India. The study will explore how colonial subjects and postcolonial citizens made their claims to water, and to political belonging, between the late-nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries.
Book discussion with the Author Radha Kumar, History, Syracuse University; Professor Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnanand, Anthropology; Chetana Sabnis, Political Science; and moderated by Rohit De, History & SASC, Yale Univesity.