Ninad Pandit

Ninad Pandit is Assistant Professor of History at the Cooper Union. He is an architect, urban planner and a historian of modern South Asia. His scholarship examines the relationships between urbanization, industrialization and the emergence of radical politics in colonial India.

Ninad’s book manuscript, The Bombay Radicals, is based on his dissertation and tells the story of working-class organizations in western India, from their origins in caste reform movement to their embrace of socialism and the Communist International and eventual decline into regional chauvinist political parties. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a group of young organizers—the Bombay Radicals—were inspired by the international working-class movement to expand the ideals of late-19th century caste reformers to encompass all industrial workers in India. They built one of the largest workers’ movements in the colonial world. At the same time, their engagement with anti-colonial politics of the Indian National Congress revived older linguistic and regional chauvinist ideas that would undermine the progressive import of this movement.

Ninad received his PhD from the Department of History at Princeton University. He previously trained as an urban planner and designer with a degree in City Planning/Design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as an architect at KRVIA, Mumbai University. He has previously worked and taught at Yale University as the Singh Postdoctoral Fellow and at LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science as the Mellon Fellow in Cities and the Humanities.

On the Dr. Malathy Singh Visiting Fellowship at Yale University:

As the Singh Fellow at Yale, I completed significant edits and rewrites for two chapters of my research. I began work on my second research project, titled New Citizens, which I first presented at the South Asia Council’s Colloquium. I also developed a new course, titled Urban South Asia, which is a study of the relationship between industrialization and the emergence of new urban social and spatial relations in colonial South Asia. Perhaps most importantly, I built meaningful relationships with fellow scholars of South Asia—both visiting and those resident at Yale—which has helped me launch my career as a historian.