Aditya Nigam

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi

Professor Aditya Nigam is a political theorist based at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. His recent work has been concerned with the decolonization of social and political theory. He has earlier worked on ideological and discursive formations and their relationship to the constitution of political subjectivities. In particular, his interest lies in theorizing the contemporary experience of politics, populism and democracy in the non-West – treating the non-West as the ground for ‘doing theory’, rather than a field for application or testing of standard frameworks derived from the Western experience. A parallel and related part of Nigam’s work has been concerned with interrogating the received ‘philosophical history’ of capital, once again from the vantage point of the experiences of India and the non-West in general. Aditya Nigam also works with the CSDS’s Indian Languages Programme and its Hindi journal Pratiman. He comments regularly on contemporary political issues on the blog Kafila.online. He is the author of The Insurrection of Little Selves: The Crisis of Secular Nationalism in India (2006), Power and Contestation: India Since 1989, with Nivedita Menon (2007), After Utopia: Modernity, Socialism and the Postcolony (2010), and Desire Named Development (2011), Decolonizing Theory: Thinking Across Traditions (2020).