Hugo HansenGraduate Student
As a historian of South Asia, I research evolving practices of democracy in independent India. By first examining the retreat of Nehruvian socialism and the effects of India’s liberalization, I hope to historicize both the resurgence of the Hindu far-right in Northern India and the failure of left-liberal circles to contain this majoritarianism with appeals to secular toleration.
Drawing on interpretive methods from anthropology and the study of gender and sexuality, I intend to interrogate the links between masculinity, collective violence and competing theories of the state. I am particularly interested in the political culture of Bombay in the latter half of the twentieth century amidst the city’s changing relationship to Maharashtra’s rural hinterlands, the Arabian Sea and the world.
Education
- A.B. Brown University
Research Interests
Modern South Asia
Nations and Nationalism
Geographies of Capital
Gender and Sexuality
Dissertation
TBD
