Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa

My research examines the global intellectual history of “mystical India.” I reconstruct how India came to be identified with mysticism and spirituality between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries—at once to sustain the mandates of imperial power and to formulate alternative universalisms that reimagined the social and political order. More broadly, I am interested in the intellectual and cultural history of Enlightenment and empire, as studied through a series of exceptions, limit-cases, and denied possibilities that invite us to re-theorize our generalizations. Ongoing projects include the circulation of early modern Jesuit missionary writings to Enlightenment and colonial contexts, citizenship debates and personal status law in British and French India, and the political thought of twentieth-century Indian feminists.