Garima Dhabhai

Assistant Professor

BA Political Science (Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University, 2008)

MA Political Studies (Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2010)

M.Phil Political Studies (Centre for Political Studies, JNU, 2012)

PhD (Centre for Political Studies, JNU, 2020)

Fox Fellow, Yale University, 2015-16

My doctoral work delves into political and spatial transformations in the city of Jaipur, which was a former princely capital. Earlier, my M. Phil research investigated forms of power and ‘princely’ representations of sovereignty in the context of colonial legalities and postcolonial practices of popular and state spectacles in the city of Jaipur. I have been involved in several teaching assignments at the undergraduate level in Delhi University specializing in papers concerning contemporary Indian politics and society, nationalism, international politics and globalization. In 2015-16, I was a Fox Fellow at Yale University in the US and was awarded UGC Junior Research Fellowship in 2010. I also got the ICSSR travel grant to present a paper in the University of Cambridge in 2014. 

I have worked on the representations of past in the urban space of contemporary Jaipur. I am mostly interested in processes and politics of heritage restoration in Indian cities, princely states in India's political history and questions of cultural representations of sovereignty in present day Indian politics. 

1. Taught Western Political Thought and International Relations at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, DU as an ad-hoc Assistant Professor in Oct-Nov 2011

2. Taught a paper on Indian Democracy at Shri Ram College of Commerce as an ad-hoc Assistant Professor in July-Nov 2012

3. Taught papers on International Politics, Nationalism, Indian Politics and Global Political Economy at St. Stephen's College as an ad-hoc Assistant Professor in 2013-14 and 2016-17.

4. I teach papers on Gender, Political Economy and Indian Politics in Presidency University 

I have supervised postgraduate dissertations on themes ranging from historiographical reimagination of colonialism in French Chandernagore, citizenship and pedagogy, space and gender, religion and politics in Kolkata, memory and urban space, representation of gender in matrimonial advertisements, UCC and so on. 

Member of British Association of South Asian Studies (BASAS) in 2016-17. 

Articles in Edited Books: 

‘'The Purusharthi Refugee: Sindhi Migrants in Jaipur's Walled City' in Sadan and Pushpendra (eds.), Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration: Leaving and Living, London: Routledge, 2021

‘Paramount State and the ‘Princely Subject’: Privy Purses Abolition and its Aftermath’ in Anupama Roy and Michael Becker (eds.), Dimensions of Constitutional Democracy, Singapore: Springer, 2020

'Excavating the City: Metro Rail Construction and Imagination of Past in Contemporary Jaipur’ in Tereza Kuldova and Mathew Varghese (eds.), Urban Utopias: Excess and Expulsions in Neoliberal South Asia, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

'Of a Lost River and a Dirty Creek: Reordering of Urban Space in Contemporary Jaipur' in Partho Datta and Narayani Gupta (eds.), Urban Spaces in Modern India, IIAS, Simla, 2018 

Peer Reviewed Articles: 

Sovereign Dreams and Bureaucratic Strategies in Princely Jaipur, c. 1750-1950’ in Princely Cities Special Edition, Urban History (2022), pp.1-20 (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926822000554)

'Visible Histories, Invisible Contestations: Narratives of 'Pink' in Jaipur', Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, Vol. 2, no. 1 (Summer 2017), pp 24-42

'The Purusharthi Refugee: Sindhi Migrants in Jaipur's Walled City', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. LIII, no. 4, January 27, 2018. 

Book Reviews: 

Book Review, 'Tarini Bedi, The Dashing Ladies of Shiv Sena; Political Matronage in Urbanizing India. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company. 2016' Studies in Indian Politics, 5(2), November 2017. 

Book Review, ‘Natasha Behl, Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019’, South Asian History and Culture, online edition, 29th July 2020.

Others:

Media Articles/Policy Briefs:

  ‘Heritage in Indian Urban Planning’ in Fox International Fellowship Policy Brief Series, 2015

  ‘Honour Aside, What Does the UNESCO Heritage Tag Mean for Jaipur’s Future?’ The Wire, July 22, 2019