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Dr. Saagar Tewari

Dr. Saagar Tewari

Associate Professor

B.A. (Honours) History, Hindu College, University of Delhi;

M.A., Modern Indian History, Hindu College, University of Delhi;

M.Phil., Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, July 2009; Dissertation entitled Guns Against Bows: Making Central India Through Development Narratives (1947-1975);

Ph.D., Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, June 2015; Thesis entitled Tribe and Development: Nation Making in Bastar, Central India (1930s-1980s).

: stewari@jgu.edu.in

Dr. Saagar Tewari is a historian of modern India. His doctoral thesis was an intellectual and constitutional history of the ‘Tribal Question’, which focussed on the discourse on ‘scheduling’ of forested and hilly regions in central and eastern India.

His forthcoming book looks at the administrative, anthropological and nationalist frameworks surrounding the ‘aboriginal tribes’ in the late colonial period. In doing so, it provides a significant intervention on the history of the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Indian Constitution. 

Saagar’s future projects include a study of the early history of the Jharkhand movement with an emphasis on the emergence of an educated tribal middle class who reinvented themselves as ‘Adibasi’. He invites potential doctoral students interested in historical research. Besides academics, Saagar loves food, travel and music.

 

  • (Forthcoming) book manuscript to be published by Orient Bl (Co-authored with Kaushalya Bajpayee) ‘The Problem’, in an issue of the Seminar magazine titled ‘The Past as Present: A Symposium on Historical Representations in Indian Cinema’, No. 759, November, 2022;
  • ‘Framing the Fifth Schedule: Tribal Agency and the Making of the Indian Constitution (1937-1950)’ in a Special Issue on ‘Many Worlds of the Adivasis’ of Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 56, No. 5, September, 2022, pp. 1556-1594, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X21000779 ;
  • Spaces of Protection, Regimes of Exception: Anthropologists, Administrators and the Framing of the Late Colonial Discourse on Tribal Regions (1920-1950)’, Karatoya: North Bengal University Journal of History, Vol. 12, March 2019, pp. 114-130;
  • ‘Nationalizing a Princely State: Democratic Politics in Tribal Bastar (1947-1980)’ published under the Working paper series at the CSDS, Delhi; ‘Debating Tribe and Nation: Hutton, Thakkar, Ambedkar and Elwin (1920-1964)’ as an Occasional Paper of the NMML (History and Society, New Series,86),2017;
  • Review of Dietmar Rothermund, Violent Traders: Europeans in Asia in the Age of Mercantilism in India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, Vol.71, No-4, Oct-Dec, 2015, pp. 373-376;
  • ‘Developing Bastar: The Dandakaranya Project’, Ravi Kumar (ed.), The Heart of the Matter-Development, Identity and Violence: Reconfiguring the Debate, Aakar Books, Delhi, 2010, pp. 115-134.

 

Environmental History; Social History.

 

History I (Foundation Course); Inter-Disciplinary Seminar 1: Self and the World; Inter-Disciplinary Seminar 2: Telling Stories; Environmental History of South Asia; Tribes in Indian History.

 

  • British Academy Visiting Fellowship 2023 at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh (UK);
  • Visiting Associate Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi (2015-16)