Anshu Malhotra

• I am Professor in the Department of Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) since November 2018. I teach varied courses, conduct research, mentor and advise graduate students besides keeping up with my professional activities, and department and university service obligations.

• I was Chair, Department of Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) from 1^st July 2022-30^th June 2025. 

• I hold the Endowed Kundan Kaur Kapany Chair of Sikh and Punjab Studies, selected after a competitive international search from November 2018 onwards. In this capacity I foster research and professional activities that enhance the profile of Sikh and Punjab Studies. I organize lectures and conferences, conduct research, advise students and hold outreach activities. 

• Working experience of 37 years in leading academic institutions. Before my present position, I was Associate Professor in the Department of History, University of Delhi, India, for 15 years where I taught courses at the MA level and advised Ph.D. and M.Phil students (2004 – 2018). Prior to that I was a lecturer and Associate Professor at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi (1988 – 2004). 

• I received my Ph.D. degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK in 1998. I received my M.Phil (1991), MA (1987) and BA (1985) degrees at the University of Delhi, India.

• I was nominated for Hughes Fellowship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2008), and held a prestigious Fellowship at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (2013-2015).

• I have 7 books – monographs, edited and co-edited volumes from leading academic publishers. Four of these are published by Oxford University Press, one from Duke University Press, one from Routledge, and another from Orient Black Swan. My book Piro and the Gulabdasis: Gender, Sect and Society in Punjab received the Hira Lal Gupta Research Award from the Indian History Congress in 2017. I have also co-edited the Brill’s Encyclopedia of Sikhism, Volume 2 (2025) with three other editors. I have published papers in leading journals and book chapters in edited volumes.

• I am on the editorial board of Cambridge University Press’s South Asia Intellectual History Series. I am also a Section Board Member for the Histories journal. I regularly review books and articles for leading University Presses and Journals for research on South Asia and Sikh and Punjab Studies.

• My research focuses on Punjab and Punjabi communities, particularly the Sikhs and the Hindus. I have studied gendered reform during the colonial period in Punjab and have studied religious and devotional poetry of an exceptionally talented poet, Piro. I regularly research on questions of gender, caste and religious identities. I study auto/biographies and have recently written on late nineteenth and early twentieth century auto/biographies of Punjabi men. I have initiated a new project on Delhi’s Punjabis, Hindus and Sikhs, who settled here after the Partition of 1947, and experienced the 1984 pogrom against Sikhs. How they build identity as Punjabis, socially, spatially, linguistically, and through other vectors, is going to be an important focus of this study. I also have an on-going project with a colleague at UC, Davis on studying the Dalit communities in California, USA. 

• I teach courses on Global Culture and Ideology; Global Histories of Women, Gender and Sexuality; History, Archives and Practice; Aspects of Histories of Punjab and the Sikhs; Gender Representation in South Asia. I have earlier taught courses on Gender & Society in Modern India; Aspects of Society & Culture in Early Modern Europe; Film, Fieldwork, Fiction & Folklore; Select Issues in the Cultural History of Modern India; Religion & Society in Modern India.

• I have organized international conferences, including Kaho Kahāniyāṅ: Stories of Punjab, Stories from Punjab at UC, Santa Barbara in May 2022 under the aegis of Kapany Chair and in collaboration with UC, Davis.

Delhi’s Punjabis: Spatiality, Identity and Belonging – 1947 to Present

This project will study what displacement, from home and homeland, and the politics of identity has meant post the cataclysmic event(s) of the Indian Partition of 1947 for the displaced Punjabis who came to Delhi from western Punjab. Centering questions of spatiality, memory, and identity, including gendered identity, it will focus on the Hindu and Sikh Punjabis who, during the trauma of 1947, found themselves on the wrong side of the border, and had to migrate. How did their now permanent residence in Delhi transmute the city from its famed Islamic culture, to a Punjabi-dominated one, till the 1980s and beyond? One set of questions will center around the twin processes of dislocation and relocation, asking how space was reimagined as physical distance from western Punjab as homeland became a reality. How this setback, of forced abandonment of home, also meant reconstituting the contours of a Punjabi identity? In other words, were there new parameters that defined what it meant to be a Punjabi or was this question irrelevant, when the very process of migration defined in some ways a Punjabi-ness that the dislocated experienced? Another set of questions will probe further the bitter fruit of the politics of identity. The decades following the 1970s in Delhi saw a rift among the Hindus and the Sikhs as identity politics gained ground, and later the impact of the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984. The Sikhs were at the receiving end of violence following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the same year that saw the desecration of the Golden Temple at Amritsar by the Indian Army to flush out Sikh ‘militants.’ Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs in Delhi, who often had similar caste and occupational backgrounds, and sometimes ties as kin, came to forefront separate religious identity. How did this impact how one viewed oneself – as a Punjabi, a Hindu or a Sikh, or all these identities remained salient in different contexts. Both sets of issues, of spatiality and identity, will be inflected with questions of memory: of a remembered homeland, of reconstituted space, of an encompassing Punjabi identity, or a fractured, narrowed religious one. How did people perceive and live these changes, and what role their memories and (post)memories play in making sense of these life-altering moments?

Historians have investigated from global, national, to local ways in which spatial issues impinge on human societies and cultures. They have interrogated how space may be concretized into place with which one develops an affective relationship. For this study, it is important to ask if spatial and territorial connection is significant in identity-making or is space an imaginary construct as much as it is a material reality. My personal and anecdotal observations over the years of living in Delhi underscore that the Punjabis of Delhi are invested in an overarching Punjabi identity despite religious and caste differences. However, the questions to ask are how they claim their Punjabi identity and what are its markers? What makes them Punjabi when they often have little territorial link to the present Indian Punjab (though Sikhs visit gurdwaras as pilgrimage sites), or the erstwhile western Punjab that used to be homeland, and they are unlikely to reside in a place called Punjab. How is space reconfigured, reimagined, and lived, for example, in Delhi’s urban sprawl, both at the time of migrating here, and contemporarily; how space can be colonized by a culture? Do people remake spaces as mirrors of abandoned ones, or does space have its own agency that impresses itself on those who inhabit it? And how, in urban contexts, do the migrants interact with those already established and sometimes unhappy with the newcomers?

The sharpening and defining of religious identities in Punjab by varied reformers who discursively reinvented ‘authentic’ religious traditions from the late nineteenth century onward has received scholarly attention. The separating and sifting of the distinctions between Sikhs and Hindus on the one hand; and how Sikhs and Hindus together were to keep away from Muslim saints/pirs on the other, was worked out by reformers interested in sharpening separations between Hindu, Sikh and Muslim identities. At the same time the permeability or fluidity between Hindu and Sikh identities before reformist interventions have been noted. During the Partition violence, the Hindus and Sikhs were ranged against Muslims all over Punjab and vice-versa. Therefore, how Hindus and Sikhs related to each other and to Muslims in Delhi is important to investigate. How the intersections of Hindu-Sikh ties could include friendships, neighborly interactions, to kinship relations are important to remember; but also, to interrogate how these changed over time, especially as Sikh grievances in the Indian Punjab grew over questions of autonomy. 

The role of memory, post-memory and cultural memory in shaping societies and fashioning selves has received exponential attention of scholars. From the way the rituals of commemoration and memorialization construct nations and communities, to how individuals center their own pasts have engaged historians. The past can be accessed through multiple disciplines and devices, and the historian’s craft is just one of the many ways of reaching back in time is widely understood. In the context of this project, where oral history and tapping of personal and community memories will be an important source to reconstruct the past and how meaning was made, theorization on memory will be a significant endeavor. That memory is a reflection from a presentist positionality will be borne in mind as I will attempt to explore the memories/post-memories of events of 1947 and 1984, how the two were seen, coalesced, separated or observed in relation (or not) to each other. Other sources will include archival, autobiographic, and other relevant materials.

The issues of identity and place-making, spatiality and the self, memory and culture, affect and mythmaking among the Punjabis of Delhi, are at the heart of this project, as these are salient in making legible how people imagine and remake themselves.

Select Publications

Books

• Piro and the Gulabdasis: Gender, Sect and Society in Punjab, Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 2017. [Received Hiralal Gupta Award by the Indian History Congress 2017]

• Gender, Caste, and Religious Identities: Restructuring Class in Colonial Punjab, Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 2002 (Paperback 2004, 2009).

• Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture and Practice, co-eds. Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir, Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 2012.

• Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia, co- ed. Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Duke University Press: Durham, 2015. (Zubaan: New Delhi, 2017).

• Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India co-eds. Tyler Williams, Anshu Malhotra and John Stratton Hawley, Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 2018.

• Bhai Vir Singh (1872-1957): Religious and Literary Modernities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Indian Punjab, co-eds. Anshu Malhotra and Anne Murphy, Routledge: London, 2023.

• Punjabi Centuries: Tracing Histories of Punjab, edited Anshu Malhotra, Orient BlackSwan: Hyderabad, 2024.

• Brill’s Encyclopedia of Sikhism, Vol. 2 (co-editors – Knut A. Jacobsen, Anshu Malhotra, Kristina Myrvold, Eleanor Nesbitt), 2025.

Refereed Journal Articles

1. “Modernity and Caste in Khatri and High Caste Men’s Auto/biographies,” Religions, 2024, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15091125 (Special Issue ed. by Opinderjit Kaur Takher) (by invitation)

2. “Stories and Histories: Gendered Performances, Caste and Sociability in Some Punjabi Domestic Tales,” Gender and History, 2023, DOI:10.1111/1468-0424.12736

3. Co-edited with Anne Murphy the Special Issue on Bhai Vir Singh: Rethinking Literary Modernity, for the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, Vo. 16, Nos. 1&2, 2020.

4. ‘Bitter-Sweet Imaginings: Form, Gender and Religion in Bhai Vir Singh’s Sundari’ in Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, Vol. 16 Nos. 1 & 2, 2020, pp. 41-65.

5. ‘Bhai Vir Singh: Rethinking Literary Modernity – An Introduction,’ Anshu Malhotra and Anne Murphy, Sikh Formation: Religion, Culture, Theory, Vol. 16, Nos. 1 & 2, 2020, pp.1-13.

6. ‘Living and Defining Caste: The Life and Writing of Giani Ditt Singh / Sant Ditta Ram,’ Journal of Punjab Studies, Vol. 20, Nos. 1 & 2, Spring-Fall 2013.

7. ‘Miracles for the Marginal? Gender and Agency in a Nineteenth Century Autobiographical Fragment,’ Journal of Women’s History, Volume 25, Number 2, Summer 2013, pp.15-35.

8. ‘Bhakti and the Gendered Self: A Courtesan and a Consort in Mid-Nineteenth Century Punjab’ in Modern Asian Studies, Vol.46, No.6, 2012, pp.1506-39.

9. ‘Telling her Tale? Unravelling a Life in Conflict in Peero’s Ik Sau Sath Kafian (One Hundred and Sixty Kafis), Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 46, No. 4, 2009, pp. 541-578.

10. ‘The Quack of Patran and Other Stories,’ Seminar, No.569, 2006, pp.74-8.

11. ‘Of Dais and Midwives - Middle Class Interventions in the Management of Women’s Reproductive Health: A Study from Colonial Punjab,’ Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 10, No.2, May-August 2003.

12. ‘The Emergence of Bazaar Literature: Jhagrras, Kissas and Reform in Early Twentieth Century Punjab’, Studies in History, Vol. xviii, No. 2, July-December 2002.

13. ‘“Every Woman is a Mother in Embryo”: Lala Lajpat Rai and Indian Womanhood’, Social Scientist, Jan–Feb. 1994.

14. 'The Moral Woman and the Punjabi Society of the 1890s', Social Scientist, May- June 1992.

Book chapters

1. “Introduction: Tracing Histories of Punjab,” in Anshu Malhotra (ed.) Punjabi Centuries: Tracing Histories of Punjab, Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2024, pp. 1-52.

2. “Introduction: Bhai Vir Singh as an Author, Scholar, and Reformist,” (co-written with Anne Murphy) in Anshu Malhotra and Anne Murphy (eds.), Bhai Vir Singh: Religious and Literary Modernities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Indian Punjab, London: Routledge, 2023, pp. 1-24.   

3. “The Conversion Loop: Gender, Identity and Storytelling in Bhai Vir Singh’s Sundari,” in Anshu Malhotra and Anne Murphy (eds.), Bhai Vir Singh: Religious and Literary Modernities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Indian Punjab, London: Routledge, 2023, pp. 65-87. 

4. ‘Between Sagacity and Scandal: Celibacy, Sexuality and a Guru in Nineteenth Century Punjab,’ in Istvan Keul and Srilata Raman (eds.), Gurus: Mapping Spirituality in Contemporary India, London: Routledge, 2023. 

5. ‘Introduction’ (co-authored with Tyler Williams) in Tyler Williams, Anshu Malhotra and John Stratton Hawley (eds), Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018.

6. ‘Introduction: Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia’ (co- authored with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley) in Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley (eds.), Speaking of the Self? Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia, Durham: Duke University Press, 2015; and reprint New Delhi: Zubaan 2017.

7. ‘Performing a Persona: Reading Piro’s Kafis,’ in Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley (eds.), Speaking of the Self? Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia, Durham: Duke University Press, Durham, 2015; and reprint New Delhi: Zubaan 2017.

8. ‘Print and Bazaari Literature: Jhagrras/Kissas and Gendered Reform in Early Twentieth Century Punjab’ in Charu Gupta (ed.), Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism, Orient Blackswan, 2012. This volume also carries my translation of a Punjabi poem, Churrelan (Witches) on reforms for women.

9. ‘Punjab in History and Historiography: An Introduction,’ (co-authored with Farina Mir) in Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir (eds.), Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture, Practice (OUP, Delhi, 2012).

10. ‘Panths and Piety in the Nineteenth Century: The Gulabdasis of Punjab,’ in Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir (eds.), Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture, Practice (OUP, Delhi, 2012).

11. ‘Shameful Continuities: The Practice of Female Infanticide in Colonial Punjab’ in Doris Jakobsh (ed.), Sikhism and Women: History, Texts and Experience, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2010.

12. ‘The Body as a Metaphor for the Nation: Caste, Masculinity and Femininity in the Satyarth Prakash of Swami Dayanand Saraswati’ in Avril A. Powell & Siobhan Lambert Hurley (eds.), Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and the Colonial Experience in South Asia, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2006.

13. ‘Of Dais and Midwives - Middle Class Interventions in the Management of Women’s Reproductive Health: A Study from Colonial Punjab’, in Sarah Hodges (ed.), Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies, Orient Longman, New Delhi, 2006.

14. ‘The Pativrata and Domestic Ideologies in Early Twentieth Century Punjab’ in Shakti Kak & B. Pati (eds.), Exploring Gender Equations: Colonial and Post- Colonial India, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 2005.

Encyclopedia Articles

1. ‘Gender, Sect and Society in Punjab’ Routledge Handbook of Punjab Studies (eds. Pritam Singh and Meena Dhanda) – London: Routledge, 2026, pp. 370-380.

2. ‘Gulab Dasi,’ Brill’s Encyclopedia of Sikhism Vol. II, Leiden, 2025 (eds. Knut Jacobsen, Anshu Malhotra, Kristina Myrvold and Eleanor Nesbitt), pp.351-358.

3. Three biographical notes on Punjabi women contributed to Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, Oxford University Press, New York, 2008. (ed. Bonnie G. Smith)

https://www.global.ucsb.edu/people/anshu-malhotra