Arighna Gupta

Arighna Gupta is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, working on a legal, cultural, and social history of popular sovereignty in early-colonial India, between 1780-1840. His dissertation, "Trajectories of the People: Popular Politics, Law, and Empire in Early-Colonial India" examines how popular politics, legal practices, and imperial authority were co-constituted in early colonial India through everyday encounters between local populations and colonial institutions. Drawing on legal records, petitions, vernacular texts, and visual sources across multiple archives in India, the US, and the UK, "Trajectories of the People" reconstructs how everyday actors navigated, appropriated, and contested emerging colonial legal regimes. A central contribution of the dissertation is its emphasis on the "trajectory" of ordinary people who navigated through legal forums and imperial structures, producing forms of political agency that were neither fully autonomous nor wholly subsumed by colonial power. Arighna was a Fellow at the Eisenberg Institute for the Historical Studies at the University of Michigan in 2025. He will be a Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt, in early 2026. Besides historical research and writing, Arighna is also invested in digital humanities. He is working on a project on the digitization of archives and the politics of open access in contemporary South Asia. He is also a New Books Network podcast host for the South Asia Studies series.