by Satadru Sen

Routledge, 2016

This book explores the life and times of the pioneering Indian sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar. It locates him simultaneously in the intellectual history of India and the political history of the world in the twentieth century. It focuses on the development and implications of Sarkar’s thinking on race, gender, governance and nationhood in a changing context.

A penetrating portrait of Sarkar and his age, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, sociology, and politics.

by Satadru Sen

Primus Books, 2014

The essays in this volume examine some of those strands, primarily in the contexts of India and the United States, but also in other parts of the world, such as Germany and Israel-Palestine. They highlight not only the particular histories of cultures of power and desire, but also the convergences of forms of power and desire originating in different historical settings.

by Satadru Sen

Primus Books, 2012

This volume examines three interrelated aspects of the history of British India: race, the disciplining institution, and attempts by the colonized to imagine states of freedom. They deal with sites as diverse as the prison, the family, the classroom, the playing field and children's literature.

(Anthem Press, 2005)

Colonial Childhoods is about the politics of childhood in India between the 1860s and the 1930s. It examines not only the redefinition of the 'child' in the cultural and intellectual climate of colonialism, but also the uses of the child, the parent and the family in colonizing and nationalizing projects. It investigates also the complications of transporting metropolitan discourses of childhood, adulthood and expertise across the lines of race. Focused on reformatories and laws for juvenile delinquents, and boarding schools for aristocratic children, it illuminates a vital area of conflict and accommodation in a colonial society.    A key addition to Anthem's South Asian series and also to the growing discipline of Childhood and Colonial Childhood studies.

(Oxford University Press, 2000)

This volume examines the first four decades in the history of the Andaman Islands penal colony. The analysis focuses on the meanings of 'crime' and 'rehabilitation' in colonial India, the objectives of punishment, and the responses of Indian criminals to the punishment inflicted by the colonial state.

(Manchester University Press, 2005)

Migrant Races is a study of image, identity and mobility in colonial India and imperial Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the career of Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, who migrated from India to England as a teenager in the 1880s and returned to India in 1907, the book unravels the significance of this "racial misfit" living in a colonial society. While in England Ranjitsinhji rose to the heights of sporting hero, captaining the English cricket team to become one of the best-known athletes in the British empire.

(Routledge, 2010)

This book examines the social, political and ideological dimensions of the encounter between the indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman islands, British colonizers and Indian settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British-Indian penal settlements in the Andaman Islands – beginning tentatively in 1789 and renewed on a larger scale in 1858 – represent an extensive, complex experiment in the management of populations through colonial discourses of race, criminality, civilization, and savagery. Focussing on the ubiquitous characterization of the Andaman islanders as ‘savages’, this study explores the particular relationship between savagery and the practice of colonialism.

Satadru Sen examines savagery and the savage as dynamic components of colonialism in South Asia: not intellectual abstractions with clear and fixed meanings, but politically ‘alive’ and fiercely contested products of the colony. Illuminating and historicizing the processes by which the discourse of savagery goes through multiple and fundamental shifts between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, he shows the links and breaks between these shifts and changing ideas of race, adulthood and masculinity in the Andamans, British India, Britain and in the wider empire. He also highlights the implications of these changes for the ‘savages’ themselves. At the broadest level, this book re-examines the relationship between the modern and the primitive in a colonial world.

(Anthem Press, 2004)

Edited with James H. Mills

The editors bring together some of the best new scholarship on physicality in modern India in a single volume and provide a balance of materials from colonial and post-colonial India. Included are new writings by established and upcoming writers in the social sciences and humanities, all based on original research.