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Uday Chandra is a political anthropologist and historian whose scholarship combines archival and ethnographic research with political theory. His monograph Resistance as Negotiation: Making States and Tribes in Modern India (2024) draws on fifteen years of archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand. The book demonstrates how notions of 鈥渢ribe鈥� have co-evolved with practices and imaginaries of state-making in the frontier margins of modern India. Resistance, Chandra argues, is best understood not as simple opposition to state power but as an ongoing process of negotiation from below.

More broadly, Chandra has published over a dozen research articles in leading journals across disciplinary boundaries on the politics of caste, tribe, and the state in modern India, as well as on patterns of circulation, mobility, and political imagination in the wider Indian Ocean world. He has co-edited three major edited volumes and three special journal issues on modern India and its entanglements across Inter-Asian and Indian Ocean worlds. Alongside academic writing, he contributes regularly to print and digital media on contemporary Indian politics and global affairs.

Chandra is currently completing a new book project that asks to what extent democratic politics can offer meaningful ways of addressing social difference and enabling collective action beyond the ideological confines of liberalism. Drawing on the promise and pitfalls of democracy in India and beyond, Democracy sans Liberalism examines how mass politics, hierarchy, and inequality increasingly coexist with high levels of electoral participation and robust expressions of popular sovereignty. Bringing together insights from political theory, anthropology, and global history, the book develops an analytical framework that moves beyond Western liberal universalism without lapsing into cultural essentialism or relativism.