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About Arighna Gupta
Arighna Gupta is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, working on a legal, cultural, and social history of popular sovereignty in early-colonial India, between 1780-1840. His dissertation, "Trajectories of the People: Popular Politics, Law, and Empire in Early-Colonial India" examines how popular politics, legal practices, and imperial authority were co-constituted in early colonial India through everyday encounters between local populations and colonial institutions. Drawing on legal records, petitions, vernacular texts, and visual sources across multiple archives in India, the US, and the UK, "Trajectories of the People" reconstructs how everyday actors navigated, appropriated, and contested emerging colonial legal regimes. A central contribution of the dissertation is its emphasis on the "trajectory" of ordinary people who navigated through legal forums and imperial structures, producing forms of political agency that were neither fully autonomous nor wholly subsumed by colonial power. Arighna was a Fellow at the Eisenberg Institute for the Historical Studies at the University of Michigan in 2025. He will be a Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in early 2026. Besides historical research and writing, Arighna is also invested in digital humanities. He is working on a project on the digitization of archives and the politics of open access in contemporary South Asia. He is also a New Books Network podcast host for the South Asia Studies series.NBN Episodes hosted by Arighna:
November 4, 2025
Reformatting Agrararian Life
Reformatting Agrarian Life presents a stealth urban history from the countryside that foregrounds the mutual entanglements of agrarian and urban exper…
September 12, 2025
An Encroaching Sea
Ecological and political instability have time and again emerged as catalysts for risky development projects along India's south-west coastline. In An…
August 28, 2025
South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought
South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law (Oxford UP, 2024) considers the legal…
December 11, 2024
The Disinherited
An illuminating history of religious and political controversy in nineteenth-century Bengal, where Protestant missionary activity spurred a Christian …
October 30, 2024
Prophetic Maharaja
How do traditions and peoples grapple with loss, particularly when it is of such magnitude that it defies the possibility of recovery or restoration? …
June 26, 2024
Placing the Frontier in British North-East India
Placing the Frontier in British North-East India: Law, Custom, and Knowledge (Oxford UP, 2023) is a study of the travels of colonial law into the Nort…
April 24, 2024
Bankrolling Empire
In this colorful book, historian Sudev Sheth traces how a family of diamond dealers deployed wealth to play off political leaders and survive the coll…
March 6, 2024
Minority Pasts
Razak Khan's Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the diversity of the histories and identi…
February 29, 2024
Assembling the Local
In 1817, in a region of the eastern coast of British India then known as Cuttack, a group of Paiks, the area's landed militia, began agitating against…
January 24, 2024
The Muslim Secular
Concerned with the fate of the minority in the age of the nation-state, Muslim political thought in modern South Asia has often been associated with r…