About
Arighna Gupta is a PhD candidate in History. His research is situated within histories of political thought, space, literary cultures, and religion. His comprehensive examination fields were in Modern South Asian History, Spatial History, and the History and Anthropology of Religion. He has also completed his cognate training in Anthropology and English Literature at Michigan. Arighna completed his M.A. and M.Phil in History from the University of Delhi, India, before joining the University Michigan. Alongwith historical writings, he is also invested in digital humanities, especially around the politics of archives and open access in the US and South Asia.
Arighna's dissertation is titled "For God, King, and the Country: Sovereignty and the People in eastern India, 1760s-1840s." It traces a history of people’s rule moving away from an Enlightenment-inspired understandings of popular sovereignty. Highlighting imperial Mughal (1526 – 1858) and Islamic religious processes as reservoirs of a discourse of popular sovereignty, his project investigates more than ten rebellions in eastern India, from 1760 till 1840. Through a history bookended by early-modern empires and modern colonial regimes, his thesis posits a coherence within the discrete processes of pre-colonial empires, Islamic reform, and popular politics in South Asia. His dissertation uses “futures past” as a methodology to write a history of people’s sovereignty, informed by religiosities, which was eroded by British legal and sovereign policies in the mid-nineteenth century. By displaying overlaps, networks, flows, and abstractions of people and ideas within disparate political formations (empires, sultanates, confederacies, princely kingdoms, itinerant rulers, and landholders), his thesis brings out a paradoxical history of people’s rule; where imperial ideals, along with religious ethics, generated anti-imperial politics. His project also envisions an entangled history of popular sovereignty which, despite borrowing from contemporary models of polities, moved beyond imperia, colonies, kingdoms, and nation-states. In doing so, the trans-local actors produced a pre-history of popular assertions by accommodating discrete castes, tribes, religious and sectarian groups, shifting and settled peasants, and petty and large landholders in an unprecedented fashion in South Asia.
