From the Secretary's Desk

Prof. Suchandra Ghosh is Professor in the University of Calcutta at the Department of Ancient Indian History & Culture. Her specialization is Epigraphy, Numismatics and early Indian scripts. Her research interests lies in Politico-Cultural History of North-west India, regional history of South-eastern Bengal, Indian Ocean Maritime Network, interactions between South and Southeast Asia and Bay of Bengal Buddhist Network special emphasis on Buddhist Clay Moulded tablets. She has published several essays in journals and books in India and abroad. Her published monographs are Exploring Connectivity: South eastern Bengal and Beyond (Institute of Social and Cultural Studies, 2015) and From the Oxus to the Indus: A Political and Cultural Study (c. 3rdcentury BCE – 1st century BCE) (Primus Books, 2017). Prof. Ghosh had been recipient of various awards and fellowships, which includes fellowship by the Maison des Sciences de l‟homme, Paris; Charles Wallace Visiting Fellowship, England; ENITAS scholarship by Institute of South-east Asian Studies, Chulalongkarn University, Bangkok; and Lowick Memorial grant for Oriental Studies by Royal Numismatic Society, London. She was also a Member of the Physical Verification Committee, Indian Museum, 2008- 2015.

Prof. Farhat Hasan is Professor in the Department of History, University of Delhi. His research interest areas lies in history of medieval India, with particular interests in court culture, identities and gender relations in the period, Islam in India during the medieval and colonial period, in particular, religious thought and practices. He has authored the monograph State and Locality in Mughal India, Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and also published many papers and articles in journals and edited books. Prof. Hasan is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society, Cambridge. He was appointed Visiting Fellow at the Maison des Sciences de’l Homme, Paris, October-November 2006. He was also a Member of the History Textbook Development Committee for Standard VII and XII, National Council of Educational Research and Training, New Delhi, for the year 2005-06.

Prof. M.D. David was Professor and head of the Department of History, University of Bombay. He was also the Emeritus Fellow at UGC, New Delhi. Prof. David has been the Pandit Sethu Madhavrao Pagadi Fellow at the University of Bombay. He has served as the Chairman of CMEF Trust in Mumbai and as the President of Bombay YMCA. He was also the Chairman of CHAI, Western India.

Prof. B.R. Deepak is Professor of Chinese and China Studies at the Centre of Chinese and Southeast Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His areas of interest are Sino-Indian Studies including history and culture; Chinese language and literature, China's socio-political and economic issues. Prof. Deepak received the prestigious "Special Book Award of China", the highest literary award conferred on foreign national for their outstanding contribution in translation, publication of Chinese books and cultural exchange in 2011 for his translated work Chinese poetry: From 11th Century BC to 14th Century AD. He is also the recipient of Nehru Fellow Award (1996) and Asia Fellow Award (2006). He is the author of India and China 1904-2004: A Century of Peace and Conflict (2005); India –China Relations in first half of the Twentieth Century (2001); China: Agriculture, Countryside and Peasantry (2010). His edited works includes India-China Relations: Civilizational Perspective (2012) and India-China Relations: Future Perspectives (2012). He has been a visiting fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China.

Born in 1966, Dr. Selvakumar is a faculty member in the Department of Epigraphy and Archaeology, Tamil University, Thanjavur. He completed doctoral research and post-Doctoral research from Deccan College, Pune. He was a faculty member at Centre for Heritage Studies, Tripunithura, Kerala, from 2003 to 2007 and a NTICVAM (Nehru Trust for the Indian Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum) Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Maritime Archaeology, Southampton University. His research interests include archaeology of India, prehistory, heritage management, maritime history and archaeology, archaeological theory, heritage management, history of science and technology, Indian Ocean Cultural interactions, and ecocriticism.

Prof. Zoya Hasan is a National Fellow, Indian Council of Social Science Research. She has been a former Professor of Political Science and the Dean of School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a former member of the National Commission for Minorities. Prof. Hasan’s work has focussed on the State, political parties, ethnicity gender and minorities in India, and society in north India. Known for her path-breaking work on the politics of Uttar Pradesh, she has also undertaken extensive research on the social and educational aspects of Indian Muslims and Muslim women. Her interest in Indian Government and politics, the State party system, political mobilisation minority rights and gender studies is reflected in her various research studies and book. Amongst her many books she has authored, Congress after Indira: Policy, Power and Political Change (1984-2009), Democracy and the Crisis of Inequality: Collection of Essays, Politics of Inclusion: Castes, Minorities and Affirmative Action, Democracy in Muslim Societies: The Asian Experience, and India’s Living Constitution: Ideas, Practices, Controversies. Along with Mushirul Hasan, she co-edited CSD’s publication, India: Social Development Report – 2012, Minorities at the Margins. She is currently completing a monograph for the ICSSR National Fellowship on Social Movements and State Action. Prof. Hasan holds a PhD from Pennsylvania State University.

Amiya Kumar Bagchi (born 1936) is a distinguished Indian political economist. His contributions have spanned economic history, the economics of industrialisation and deindustrialisation, and development studies from an overall Marxist perspective, incorporating insights from other schools of radical political economics, including left Keynesianism. Among Marxists, he is known for his extensive contributions to theories of imperialism and underdevelopment. His academic career began when he started teaching in Presidency College, Kolkata. In the 1960s, he taught in the Faculty of Economics in Cambridge (where he was Fellow of Jesus College), but resigned his post in 1969, to resume his academic career in Presidency College, Kolkata. In 1974 he joined the newly founded Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, which went on to become one of the most productive and globally famous research institutions in India. Bagchi has specialised in the history of Indian banking and finance, and acted as Official Historian of the State Bank of India (SBI) from 1976 to 1998; he played a leading role in ensuring that the unique archives of SBI are preserved for posterity. After retiring as Reserve Bank of India professor from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta in 2001, he became the founder-director of the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata, a multidisciplinary centre of excellence in the social sciences, which is affiliated with the University of Calcutta, and is promoted by the government of West Bengal. Here, he spearheads research in development studies in an array of areas, notably banking and finance, public health, labour studies, information and communication studies, gender studies, education, and the sociology of literature. He has been Visiting Professor in international academic institutions such as Cambridge University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Cornell University, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, Naples University, and University of Bristol.

R. Mahalakshmi is Professor at the Center for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests include the development of state, society, religion, and art in ancient and medieval India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Her book The Making of the Goddess: Korravai-Durga in the Tamil Traditions (Penguin, 2011) was awarded the prize for the best book by a woman historian by the Indian History Congress in 2013. She has also authored The Book of Lakshmi (Penguin, 2009) and Colonization: A Comparative Study of India and Korea, co-edited with Vyjayanti Raghavan (Academic Foundation Books, 2015), in addition to articles in peer-reviewed journals and books. She is the Secretary of the Indian History Congress for the period 2018-20. She has delivered the Presidential addresses of the Historiography Section of the Andhra Pradesh History Congress for 2018-19, and the Ancient Section of the Punjab History Conference (2019-20).

Professor Bodh Prakash teaches at the School of Letters at Ambedkar University Delhi. He has worked on the intersections between history, literature and ideology. His main areas of research are Partition, gender, violence and cultural diversity in South Asia.Author of Writing Partition: Aesthetics and Ideology in Hindi and Urdu Fiction, he has published widely on issues of identity and culture in a multi-lingual and multi-religious society and the challenges of majoritarian and totalitarian, political formations to the age old inclusive, consensual culture fashioned over centuries in comtemporary India.

Professor Irfan Habib is Emeritus Professor of Department of History of AMU he also held the post of Chairman in the same department. He served as coordinator of Centre of Advanced Studies in Department of History of AMU. He was appointed as the Chairman of Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR). He was General Secretary, Sectional President and General President in 1981 and Vice-President in 2006 of Indian History Congress. He delivered Radhakrishnan Lecture at Oxford and he was recognized by the international community as Corresponding Fellow of British Royal Historical Society. He was bestowed with Padma Bhushan in 2005. He has authored and edited many books and research papers on various fields of Indian and World History. The Agrarian System of Mughal India is one of his widely acclaimed works. He edited works like People’s History of India Series and UNESCO publications and The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. Ifor this work he was awarded Watumull Prize.

Dr. Burton Cleetus teaches Modern History at the Centre for Historical Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University. His area of specialization is history of science and medicine. He has studied emergence of biomedicine in Europe, healthcare practices in non-European societies, indigenous response to western medicinal intervention, repositioning and institutionalization of indigenous health care traditions. He also looked at public health initiatives taken up during colonial India and the interventions of Christian missionaries in the field of medicine. His published articles and chapters include ‘Missionaries, Marxists and the “model State”: Engaging with political practices in Kerala’, ‘Relocating the Kottakal Experiment: Science, Medicine and Society in Colonial Malabar’, ‘Negotiating Western Science and the State: The Institutionalization of the Indigenous Medicine in Kerala, 1900‐1947’ and ‘Subaltern Medicine and Social mobility: The Experience of Ezhavas in Kerala’.

Krishna Mohan Shrimali (b. 1947), former Professor of History at the University of Delhi, is the author of A History of Pañcāla, 2 vols (1983, 1985); Agrarian Structure in Central India and the Northern Deccan: A Study in Vākāṭaka Inscriptions (1987); and Dharma, Samaj aur Sanskriti (2005). He has edited Indian Archaeology since Independence (1996) and Reasons and Archaeology (1998). He has published widely in academic journals, on ancient Indian history and archaeology. He is currently working on a project on Dictionary of Social, Economic and Administrative Terms in Indian Inscriptions. He presided over the Ancient Indian History Section of the Indian History Congress in 1988, and general president in 2017 and was also the Secretary, Indian History Congress, 1992-95.