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Biography
Arun Kumar joined the History Department in September 2019. He is a historian of modern India with an interest in social, economic, education and labour history. His work explores different facets of working-class life histories including their dreams, education, night-time histories, and childhood. He is currently working on his first book-project tentatively titled, The Silent Rebellion: Working-Class Dreams, Education and Welfare Capitalism.
Dr. Kumar's research has appeared in journals such as Past & Present, South Asia: Journal of South Asia, Journal of South Asian Development, and his writings have been translated into Ukrainian language. He frequently writes public history essays for newspapers and magazines such as The Wire, Aeon, Scroll. His academic and public engagement work on rural libraries has been featured in Mumbai Mirror, Times of India, Dainik Jagran (Hindi newspaper).
After finishing his schooling in a rural school, Dr. Kumar moved to Delhi University in 2007 to study BA Honors History at Delhi College of Arts & Commerce. He was the president of the History Association and an advisor to the Student Union.
For his MA History, Dr. Kumar studied at St. Stephen's College and the Department of History, Delhi University. He was awarded the prestigious Lala Ram Mohan Prize for securing the first rank in the university.
He completed his PhD (2013-17) in South Asian history at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Goettingen University. His PhD on the educational dreams of Indian workers was part of the Transnational Research Group on 'Poverty and Education in Modern India' which was funded by the Max Weber Foundation.
Kumar's PhD work was awarded the Outstanding Dissertation Prize of the German Historical Institute London for the year 2018.
Before joining Nottingham University, Dr. Kumar worked as a research fellow at the International Institute of Social History Amsterdam, Linnaeus University Sweden, and the Merian-Tagore International Centre for Advanced Studies (ICAS) New Delhi.
Expertise Summary
Geographical Area of Research:
Modern South Asia (India) and the British Empire
Research Interests:
Colonial and Imperial History, Social and Economic History, Capitalism, Global Labour History, Childhood, Education and Knowledge Formation, Agrarian History, Working-Class Aspirations and Dreams, History of the Night, History of Poverty and Inequality
Teaching Summary
I teach the following modules:
HIST 2049, Rule & Resistance in Colonial India
HIST 3104, Global Histories of Labour & Capital: Perspectives from India
Research Summary
Arun Kumar's current research sits at the intersection of social, education, and labour history. His current book project, titled The Silent Rebellion: Working Class Dreams, Education and Capitalism… read more
Selected Publications
Current Research
Arun Kumar's current research sits at the intersection of social, education, and labour history. His current book project, titled The Silent Rebellion: Working Class Dreams, Education and Capitalism explores the lives of the nineteenth and twentieth-century artisans, factory workers, and footloose labourers to understand their labouring and non-labouring world. The book challenges fundamental major theoretical conclusions of modern Indian history that present workers as illiterate beings and study their lives merely in terms of their work identity and manual labour. Kumar proposes that workers who were born as workers did not always die as workers. In their life-cycle, they travelled around, studied, and sought new career opportunities. In doing so, their notions of manual labour and the need for work changed. Similarly, in their day-cycle workers did not just do labour. They dreamed of a non-working identity and a life for themselves and their children. They read books, attended night schools, and wrote prose and poetry. Kumar employs the history of the night-time and childhood as methodological procedures to uncover the non-working lives of manual labourers. He proposes that historians by not exploring the working lives beyond their work time and work-related aspects (strikes, migration) reduce workers to their colonial and elite notions of mere 'working-hands'. In doing so, the book also explores the manual labour aspects of the Indian caste system. It proposes that workers who often came from marginalized social backgrounds did not just rebel against their fixed working identity but also their caste identity which had tied them to perform labour for centuries.
Past Research
Arun has worked on the art of letter-writing culture among the subaltern groups. He looks at how mobile labouring groups transformed a very elite activity of letter-writing into a mass culture by the nineteenth and twentieth century.
He has also written on the history of the working-class nights, 'untouchable schools', and industrial schools.
Future Research
Dr. Kumar has also been involved in reading the newly discovered papers of Joseph Stephens, the Scandinavian businessmen who made fortune in colonial India working as a railway contractor. Joseph spent 9 years in India from 1859 to 1868 and left a wonderful archive of letter correspondence with Great India Peninsular Railway Company, personal diaries, photographs, workers' details, work contracts, accounts at his residence Huseby Bruk for historians. Kumar is focussing on the language of workers' contracts to write a larger history of the relationship between capitalism and contract. He is also using the archive to make a point about the global imperial history where non-imperial actors such as the residents from the Scandinavian countries were crucial in shaping colonialism.