Partha Chatterjee

Culture of Nationalism, Ethnicity and Religion, Postcolonial Democracy, Capitalism in Agrarian Societies

South Asia; India

Partha Chatterjee is a political theorist, political anthropologist and historian. He graduated from Presidency College, Calcutta, and received his PhD from the University of Rochester. Since 1997, he has divided his time between Columbia University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he was the director from 1997 to 2007. He is the author of more than thirty books and edited volumes in English and Bengali. He was a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.

His books include The Black Hole of Empire (2012), Lineages of Political Society (2011), Politics of the Governed (2004), A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2002), The Nation and Its Fragments(1993) and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986). Chatterjee delivered the Ruth Benedict lectures in April 2018 which was published in an expanded version as I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today (2019). His most recent book is an edition of a found manuscript entitled The Truths and Lies of Nationalism as Narrated by Charvak (2021).

He is also a playwright whose play Chokher Bali (Sand in My Eye) was staged at Barnard College in 2016. A volume of seven of his Bengali plays is to be published in 2021.

University of Rochester, PhD in Political Science, 1972
University of Rochester, MA in Political Science, 1970
University of Calcutta, BA in Political Science, 1967