Arighna Gupta

Arighna Gupta is a PhD Candidate in History working on a legal, cultural, and social history of sovereignty in early-colonial India, between 1780-1840. His dissertation, "For God, King, and the Country: Sovereignty and the People in Early Colonial India," traces a history of the production and the foreclosure of popular sovereignty as legal, symbolic, and quotidian processes. It argues that while Muslim and non-Muslim peasants, migrants, ascetics, factory workers, litterateurs, and religious reformers envisioned radical possibilities for the future, upper-caste Hindu actors and an evolving colonial law laid out the limits to such forms of sovereignty. Moving away from state-centered discussions of popular politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, "For God, King, and the Country" situates people's actions through affective and aesthetic registers.  Drawing on archival, literary, and ethnographic research conducted in India, the UK, and the USA, the dissertation foregrounds charismatic politics, pre-colonial legal histories, aesthetics, literary cultures, and colonial law in sources such as British judicial depositions, Mughal deeds of representation, colonial watercolors, Islamic courtly and reform manuals, and colonial trials, respectively. 

Besides historical research and writing, Arighna is invested in digitial humanities. He is working on a project on the digitization of archives and the politics of open access in contemproary India and Bangladesh. He is also a New Books Network podcast host for the South Asia Studies series. Arighna is a Fellow at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies for 2025-6.