Anthropology PhD alumnus Souvanik Mullick awarded Sardar Patel award

Souvanik Mullick has been announced as the 2024 winner of the Sardar Patel Award for his dissertation, "Democracy in Motion: Livelihoods, Politics, and Small Transport Operations in Delhi, India," completed at Yale University in the Department of Anthropology in 2023. 

 

The statement of the committee on the winning dissertation is as follows:

 

Dr. Mullick’s dissertation draws on rigorous ethnographic research in Delhi with rickshaw drivers of various kinds to ask how democracy actually operates in what is frequently touted as the world's largest democracy. Through multiple years of on-the-ground fieldwork, Mullick examines how political action by those with the least resources--the migrant, working poor--gives shape to the forms of democratic governance that structure everyday life in India's capital city. Both a lawyer and anthropologist by training, Mullick uses his multidisciplinary expertise to challenge theories of democracy and urban politics built from on high, seeking instead a more granular view of what it means to live democracy from below, evidenced with richly illustrative ethnographic accounts. In addition, he draws on extensive archival research to better understand the evolution of urban law. The dissertation significantly advances ongoing efforts in the social sciences to better appreciate the everyday functioning of law, statecraft, and democracy in postcolonial contexts. In sum, this is a work that will make important contributions to scholarship in anthropology, law, urban studies, and South Asian studies--but it will also help us to better understand how democracy is given form by those who ply the streets of the postcolonial state, within and beyond India. 

 

Dr. Mullick will be presenting work from his dissertation at the award ceremony, to be held at UCLA on Sunday 5 October 2025 with the Friends of the Sardar Patel Association who donated the money that endows this award.

 

Souvanik Mullick is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and Humanities at Princeton University. His research, drawing upon historical archives and ethnographic fieldwork, centers on democracy, law, state, cities, labor, and politics. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his doctoral dissertation that explores how legalism and the changing tides of urban life, labor, property, state, and political forms adapt to each other in South Asia across a 100-year period. Dr Mullick received his PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Yale University in December 2023 and law degrees from the University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor (LL.M, Grotius Fellow, 2013) and West Bengal University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata (BA. LL. B (Hons), 2010). His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, USA (2019), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, New York (2019), and the Yale Macmillan Center (2018), among others.