Neeti Nair

Assistant Professor (2006)

Office Hours: Tuesdays, 4 to 6 pm

Office: 234 Nau Hall

Phone: (434) 924-6417

Email: nn2v (at) virginia.edu

Fields & Specialties

Education 

B.A. – St Stephen’s College, Delhi University, 1998
M.A. – Tufts University, 2000
Ph.D. – Tufts University, 2005

Select Publications

Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and Delhi: Permanent Black, 2011.

‘“Partition” and “minority rights” in Punjabi Hindu Debates, 1920-1947’. Economic and Political Weekly, December 24, 2011, Vol. XLVI, No. 52, pp. 61-69.

‘Bhagat Singh as “satyagrahi”: the limits to non-violence in late colonial India’ in Modern Asian Studies, 43, 3, May 2009, pp. 649-681.

‘Restraint vs. Denial: The struggle between India and Pakistan’ in Harvard International Review, 6 February, 2009. http://hir.harvard.edu/restraint-v-denial

Review of Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009 in Journal of Islamic Studies, 21, 3, September 2010.

Review of Tarun K. Saint, Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction, New Delhi: Routledge, 2010 in Seminar, June 2010. 

Review of Stanley Wolpert, Shameful Flight: the last years of the British Empire in India, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 in Journal of British Studies, 47, 2, April 2008.

Recent Presentations

‘“Partition” and “minority rights” in Punjabi Hindu Debates, c. 1920-1947’, American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, 7 January 2012.

Commentary for Alon Confino, ‘The Coast of Tantura: 1948 and after’, 1948 in Palestine: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, Page-Barbour Initiative on Forced Migration in the Modern World, University of Virginia, 5 November 2011.

‘Surprise, Disbelief, and the Telos of Partition’, Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi, 4 August 2011.

‘The Problem of Return for Partition’s Punjabi Hindu Refugees’, Center for South Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Association for Asian Studies, Honolulu, April 2011.

‘Om shantih, ameen: between communalism and anti-colonial nationalism’, Workshop on ‘Radical Politics in 20th century Punjab’, European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies,University of Bonn, Germany, 29 July 2010.

‘“Kehte hain naasur hai”: memory and the search for meaning in post-Partition Delhi’, Ambedkar University, Delhi, 5 May 2010.

Roundtable on Mrinalini Sinha’s Specters of Mother India: the global restructuring of an Empire, Mid-Atlantic Conference on British Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, 25 April 2009.

‘We left our keys with our neighbors: Memory and the search for meaning in post-partition Delhi’, Socio-Cultural Workshop, Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, 22 January 2009. 

‘Thinking through Mumbai: A Panel Discussion and Teach-In’, University of Virginia, 3 December 2008.

‘Gandhian satyagraha as terrorism: the limits to non-violence in late colonial India’, Conference on Terrorism and Modernity: Global Perspectives on Nineteenth Century Political Violence, Co-sponsored by the German Historical Institutes at Washington D.C., Paris and London, and the Department of History at Tulane University, New Orleans, 23 - 26 October 2008.

‘Om shantih, ameen: religiously informed anti-colonial protest’, Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 18 October 2008.

‘“Unity cannot be purchased at the cost of Hindu rights”: the Nation debated as Hindu’, Association for Asian Studies, Atlanta, and Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Virginia, April 2008.

Current Research

My first book Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India traces the politics of Punjabi Hindus in the first half of the twentieth century. A religiously defined minority in undivided Punjab, these Hindus aligned themselves with Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs during various critical anti-colonial national movements. But almost simultaneously they inched eastward, towards the rest of Hindu-majority India, styling themselves 'communalists' and their politics 'communal'. I study their politics, mark their particular motivations, and account for the suddenness with which Partition and Partition violence struck - both in history and in memory. The book has been published by Permanent Black in India and Harvard University Press in the rest of the world.

Blog Posts, Media Reviews and comments on Changing Homelands

Event, Metamorphosis, Memory: Opening the Curtain on a Minority View of Partition, Permanent Black Blog, 5 January 2011.

http://permanent-black.blogspot.com/2011/01/short-interview-with-neeti-nair-whose.html

The Page 99 Test, 22 March 2011.

http://page99test.blogspot.com/2011/03/neeti-nairs-changing-homelands.html

Writers Read, 25 March 2011.

http://whatarewritersreading.blogspot.com/2011/03/neeti-nair.html

Review by J. Sri Raman, ‘Punjabi Hindus and Partition’, The Hindu, 19 July 2011.

http://www.thehindu.com/arts/books/article2255637.ece

Syed Badrul Ahsan, ‘Revisiting August 1947’, The Daily Star, Bangladesh, 10 August 2011.

http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=197899

A. G. Noorani, ‘Gandhi’s No to Satyagraha’, Frontline, 13-26 August, 2011.

http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2817/stories/20110826281704700.htm

Nikhil Govind, ‘Minorities and Majorities’, Review essay in India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 38, Issue 2, Autumn 2011, 144-147.

Uditi Sen, Review essay in Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 13, Issue 4, December 2011, 511-515.

Click here for more information on the book

My second project is on the place of humanities and social sciences in Indian higher education, 1900-the present.