Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa

I study the intellectual and cultural history of empire, with particular interest in forms of spirituality and belief, the circulation and institutionalization of knowledge, and personal status law. My current project traces how India was associated with mysticism and spirituality between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. I am interested in how historical actors understood “mystical India” not only in binary opposition to Europe, but as a resource to develop alternative universalisms and to reimagine their social and political order. More broadly, my research follows exceptions, limit-cases, and denied possibilities in the historical encounter between Europe and India since the early modern period. I have worked on the circulation of Jesuit missionary writings about Indian society to Enlightenment France and British India, the university politics of researching and teaching Indian languages in Victorian Britain, citizenship and personal status in the French empire, and the political thought of the Indian women’s movement.