Anshu Saluja
Areas of Interest & Expertise
- Contemporary History and Politics
- Community Histories
- Intersections between Religion and Politics
- Memory and Memorialisation
- Oral Histories and Narratives
- Space and Spatiality
- Transition from the Colonial to the Postcolonial
- Urban Studies
- Women’s Involvement in Social and Political Movements
Biography
Anshu obtained her PhD from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Prior to that, she pursued MA and MPhil in Modern Indian History from the same university.
Upon completing her PhD, she worked in the Department of Higher Education, Madhya Pradesh, where she was appointed as an Assistant Professor of History. During this stint, she taught in three colleges in the state.
Her research maps competing trajectories of intercommunity engagement in South Asia, encompassing shared bonds and fraught divides. Drawing upon a combination of the written and the oral, the archival and the experiential, it further explores how different communities imagine, inhabit, navigate, and lay claims to the contemporary urban in South Asia.
She has presented her research findings at different conventions and conferences, published academic articles as well as contributed opinion pieces to popular English-language dailies.
Beyond academic pursuits, she enjoys reading, going for walks, and visiting the Himalayas.
Publications
Journal Articles
- Saluja, A. (2017). Mapping the contours of communal violence in India: A critical engagement with existing scholarship and emerging trends. Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 12(2 – 3), 142 – 172. https://doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2015.1102554
- Saluja, A. (2016, April 9). Dhar on tenterhooks. Economic and Political Weekly. 51(15). https://epw.in/node/146860/pdf
- Saluja, A. (2015). Engaging with women’s words and their silences: Mapping 1984 and its aftermath. Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 11(3), 343 – 365. https://doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2015.1102554
- Saluja, A. (2015). Shadows of 1984: Exploring the communal question. Social Action: A Quarterly Review of Social Trends, 65(2), 162 – 178.
Chapter in Edited Book
- Saluja, A. (2022). Conflicting modes of agency and activism: Conversations with Hindutva women. In A. Basu, & T. Sarkar (Eds.), Women, Gender and Religious Nationalism (pp.169 – 191). Cambridge University Press.
Newspaper Articles
- Saluja, A. (2023, April 9). Putting up with patrilocality. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/putting-up-with-patrilocality-8546112/
- Saluja, A. (2023, January 11). Telling labels. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/telling-labels-structure-of-caste-based-distinction-and-discrimination/cid/1909160
- Saluja, A. (2022, July 18). What happened to the rights discourse? Deccan Herald. https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/panorama/what-happened-to-the-rights-discourse-1127943.html
- Saluja, A. (2022, February 3). There’s no shelter from the storm. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/theres-no-shelter-from-the-storm/cid/1850246
- Saluja, A. (2021, December 1). The historian’s craft. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/history-writing-and-teaching-have-to-be-about-what-was/cid/1841306
- Saluja, A. (2021, November 21). Forgetting the city. The Indian Express.https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/habibganj-railway-station-bhopal-muslim-rulers-7631933/
Online Articles
- Saluja, A. (2022, August 17). Building a bridge through time: Partition through oral histories. South Asian Voices. https://southasianvoices.org/building-a-bridge-through-time-partition-through-oral-histories/
- Saluja, A. (2020, August 8). And so, they began to walk again. Mainstream Weekly. http://mainstreamweekly.net/article9794.html