Saurabh Dube


Saurabh Dube is an Indian scholar whose work combines history and anthropology, archival and field research, and subaltern studies and postcolonial perspectives. After teaching at the University of Delhi, since 1995 he is Professor of History at the Center of Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México in Mexico City.
Dube has been described as having "...long been one of the most interesting and perceptive scholars addressing the dilemmas of modernity in South Asia." His work has been appreciated for setting up conversations between scholarship on South Asia and Latin America, combining "...sociology, history, anthropology, and postcolonial studies to present a nuanced analysis of the challenges confronting our contemporary understandings of empire and modernity, power and difference, and nation and history." Dube's work has been read for "...its lyrical tenor, conversational approach and inspired indecision between the archive and the field.... an irresistible feast for the historical imagination... that is visibly kind to theoretical abstractions", while it closely addresses details, especially of the Chhattisgargh region. His last authored book, Subjects of Modernity has been heralded as “ranging widely and globally - from histories of empires and genealogies of disciplines to recent Dalit artwork from India - to explore and carefully delineate a tension he regards as fundamental to the formation of the modern: the modern subject's inevitable entanglement with those subject to modernity. A tour de force, this book offers a critical, timely and powerful sequel to postcolonial and subaltern studies”. The work has also been appreciated as modelling “a form of critical scholarship that is generous in its engagement with the work of its interlocutors even as it pushes against the latest clichés to chart new directions”. Others, however, have found Dube's writing to be far too theoretical and vastly broad in scope.

Biographical

Dube was born to anthropologist parents, S.C. Dube and Leela Dube. He received the BA and MA degrees in History from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi; an MPhil from the University of Delhi; and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Dube has held visiting professorships several times at institutions such as Cornell University and the Johns Hopkins University. He has also been a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, South Africa, and the Max Weber Kolleg, Germany. He is married to fellow cultural historian, Ishita Banerjee. Both Dube and Ishita Banerjee have been elected recently to the D.D. Kosambi Visiting Research Professorship in Interdisciplinary Studies of the Goa University, a Chair previously held by Romila Thapar, Sudhir Kakar, Madhav Gadgil, and Shahid Amin.

Work

Dube’s research explores questions of colonialism and modernity, law and legalities, caste and community, evangelization and empire, and popular religion and subaltern art. Apart from more than one hundred journal articles and book chapters, his authored books include Untouchable Pasts ; Stitches on Time ; After Conversion ; Subjects of Modernity, as well as a quintet in historical anthropology in the Spanish language comprising Sujetos subalternos, Genealogías del presente, Historias esparcidas, Modernidad e Historia, and Formaciones de lo contemporaneo, published by El Colegio de México. A 700 page anthology of his writings in Spanish is forthcoming in 2018 also from El Colegio de México. Among Dube’s fifteen edited and co-edited volumes are Postcolonial Passages ; Historical Anthropology ; Enchantments of Modernity ; Ancient to Modern, Modern Makeovers, and Crime through Time.