Sunil Kumar Sahu is Leonard E. and Mary B. Howell Professor of Political Science at DePauw University. He has been a member of the Political Science department since 1988 and was the department chair for 10 years. Prior to DePauw, he taught Political Science at St. Xavier College in Chicago and Delhi University in India. A naturalized citizen of the United States, Sahu is a native of India. He was born in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, in a political family—his father, a grandfather and two uncles were involved in India's independence movement. Sahu attended L.S. College in Muzaffarpur, where he was influenced by the faculty who carried on the legacy of nationalist leaders who had taught at that college a generation earlier, such as Dr. Rajendra Prasad, India's first President, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, a Hindi nationalist poet, and J.B. Kripalani, President of Indian National Congress at the time of the country's independence in 1947. Sahu received his Bachelor's degree in Political Science and History from Bihar University in India, his Master's degrees in Political Science from Bihar University and the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Before starting his Ph.D. program, Sahu received advanced graduate training in International Relations at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi. His teachers at the University of Chicago included Lloyd Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Philip Schmitter, Leonard Binder, Adam Przeworski, and Tang Tsou, as well as Bernard Silberman in comparative politics and Charles Lipson and Morton A. Kaplan in international relations. Sahu is the department's specialist in Comparative Politics, Politics of Developing Nations, Terrorism, and International Politics/International Political Economy. He offers a number of courses at the introductory, intermediate and advanced levels: Intro to Comparative Politics and Government, Contemporary Political Ideologies, China and India in the 21st Century, Politics of Developing Nations, International Terrorism, Conflict and Cooperation in the Post-9/11 World, and International Relations of South Asia. He also teaches a Winter Term course on Bollywood Films: Classic and Contemporary. Sahu is married and has two adult children. He lives in Avon, Indiana with his wife, Indu Vohra, also a political scientist. He is a member of two Indian religious and cultural organizations in greater Indianapolis—Gita Mandal and Sikh Satsang. He is a political "news junkie" and his hobbies include photography and Bollywood oldies—films and songs.
Works
Sahu is the author of the book Technology Transfer, Dependence and Self-Reliant Development in the Third World: The Machine-Tool and Pharmaceutical Industries in India and book chapters "Religion and Politics in India: The Rise of Hindu Nationalism and the Bharatiya Janata Party in India," in Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: The One, the Few, and the Many, edited by Ted Jelen and Clyde Wilcox and "Changing Regimes in Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property in India," in C. Steven LaRue, The India Handbook. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and reference books and encyclopedias. He recently published "Globalization, WTO and the Indian Pharmaceutical Industry," in Asian Affairs: An American Review. He is currently working on a book titled Democracy in the Third World: Why it has succeeded in India and failed in Nigeria and a monograph on Nuclear Security in South Asia. During a sabbatical leave in 2003, Sahu conducted field research in India where he interviewed India's top nuclear and missile scientists, including President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. He was the campus host for Benazir Bhutto, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, during her visit to DePauw in 1997.
