Bio
Ravinder Kaur is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
Her core research focuses on two formative moments in the history of modern India: the mid-20th century political liberation and the making of the postcolonial state and the 1990s economic liberalisation which reforged India as an emerging market power.
Her most recent work Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India (Stanford, 2020) delves into the processes of capitalist transformations in India. Tracing the long history of the 1990s economic reforms, the book unpacks the yet ongoing transformation of the postcolonial nation into an ‘attractive investment destination’, and the attendant rise of investment-fuelled cultural nationalism.
Her ethnographic focus is broadly on decolonization, state formation, and the making of modern citizenship. Grounded in postcolonial Delhi city, her first book Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (Oxford 2007, 2018) draws attention to the government of humanitarian crisis – of displacement, the loss of home and livelihood – and the making of the modern nation and its citizenry along the intersection of caste, class and gender.
She is currently engaged in an enquiry on the idea of emerging markets and the ongoing capitalist transformations in the global south. Tentatively entitled How the Search for “Economic Miracles” is Re-Shaping the World, this research delves into the yet unwritten global history of “economic miracles,” an idea which discloses counterintuitive connections between seemingly separate spheres of human life – of the national economy and historical memory, economic growth and cultural imaginaries – as well as entanglements between the global south and the north. The speculative boom of BRICS nations or emerging markets as the millennial economic miracles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America discloses how the new taxonomy of economic frontiers – of resources and labour – is produced in a world conceived as a commodity.
Two New Books:
The People of India: New India Politics in the 21st Century (Penguin, 2022) coedited with Nayanika Mathur
Economic Miracles and Their Afterlives, Radical History Review (Duke University Press 2025) coedited with Barbara Weinstein
