Directory of Research and Expertise

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Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Colonies & Colonization, emigration & immigration, Communications, Communities, Classes, Races, Contemporary History, Digital resources, History of the book, International Relations, Modern History , Modernism, Photography, Political Institutions, Politics, Social Sciences, Socialism, Communism, Anarchism

Research keywords:

Censorship, Information warfare, Propaganda, Cheap and DIY print, Visual and material texts, Radical print, Media, Collections and archives

Regions:

Asia, United Kingdom

Summary of research interests and expertise:

Pragya Dhital is a Lecturer in Collections, Archives and the Study of the Book. Much of her research has been on India but she increasingly works on modern and contemporary Britain, bringing insights from long-term study of South Asia. She joined the SAS from the UK National Archives, where she was Records Specialist for Empire and Commonwealth, and UCL, where she taught in the Sarah Parker Remond Centre. She has also worked as a Hindi and Urdu cataloguer in the British Library and taught in the Politics and Anthropology departments at SOAS for several years.

Her first book, The Technopolitics of Communication in Modern India, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic in 2025. Her second book project concerns an archive of seditious publications banned in colonial India and now jointly held by the British Library and the National Archives of India. She came across this material whilst working in the British Library. She did further research in UK and Indian archives whilst a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2018-2022). 

A transnational perspective informs her most recent research in the UK National Archives on the war diaries of Special Operations Executive campaigns in Southeast Asia during the Second World War. This forms the basis for a new project on ‘Worlding WW2’, which she is currently developing. This would be an interdisciplinary study of the impact of the war on the built and natural environment, and how it affected people’s sense of those spaces into the Cold War period and beyond.  It would also deal with the aligned conceptual process, in which technologies, ideologies, and laws have been transformed as they moved across geographical frontiers and historical periods – from fascism to the application of the 1951 Genocide Convention.  

She has disseminated her research through numerous public engagement activities in collaboration with a wide range of galleries, archives, libraries and museums: public workshops at UCL (2018 and 2022), an open-access special section of History Workshop Journal (2020), an exhibition at SOAS art gallery (Crafting Subversion: DIY and Decolonial Print, spring-summer 2022) as well as through blogs, podcasts, talks, events and film screenings.  She is currently working on an exhibition-related publication with researchers at SAS, the BL, TNA and KCL, and the graphic novelist, Sarnath Banerjee.  

Pragya is interested in supervising doctoral projects on:
-    Censorship and surveillance
-    Propaganda and information warfare
-    Hate speech and extreme speech
-    Radical print
-    DIY and cheap print (newspapers, pamphlets, zines, ephemera) 
-    Visual and material texts
-    New approaches to collections and archives, critical bibliography and digital humanities 

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
23-Jan-2025	The Technopolitics of Communication in Modern India: Paper Chains and Viral Phenomena Monographs This book looks at the role of media technologies in modern Indian nationalism and democracy. From the Brexit referendum in 2016 to the phenomena of 'Trumpism' and 'Putinism', there has been much speculation about the role played by new media in an apparent return of illiberal politics and primordial identities. This book argues these developments could best be understood by not taking identity for granted as a static and exclusive form of affiliation. It also emphasises how the technical and material are interwoven into human thought and action rather than acting upon them externally. It accordingly focuses on the technopolitical means by which communities have been ventriloquised by state and non-state actors during critical periods in Indian political history across various media - from newspapers, manifestos and magazines to radio broadcasts, speeches and online platforms. Chapters cover censorship of the Urdu press during WW1, prison writing produced during the emergency of 1975-77, regulation of public speech during the 2014 general election, and the Citizenship Amendment Act protests of 2019-20. Across these cases, the book works towards an alternative, more reflexive, basis for popular representation, one that does not sacralise 'the people' and assume power in their name.
06-Sep-2023	Men, mules and machines: The South East Asian battlespace of the Second World War Articles A blog on the UK National Archives' website on the 'Chindits', special forces engaged in irregular warfare against the Japanese in occupied Burma (current day Myanmar) during the Second World War. This blog looks at some of the most famous and controversial aspects of Operation Longcloth (February to June 1943), the Chindits’ first campaign, as related in the war diaries of the 13 King’s Regiment (Liverpool), which are held at the National Archives.
14-Dec-2020	'Plugging the holes in history': banned political pamphlets in colonial India Articles A piece for the British Library's Asia and Africa blog on pamphlets in the British Library's Proscribed Publications and George Orwell collections.
23-Mar-2020	Archiving Insurgency Articles An introduction to a special section of History Workshop Journal (Volume 89, Spring 2020) on the proceedings of a conference held at UCL in 2018, on the British Library's Proscribed Publications collection.
13-May-2019	From ‘Imam ul-Hind’ to Azizulhind: the ‘one man media house’ in modern India Journal articles An article in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Volume 42, 2019, Issue: 3, pp. 452-468
21-Mar-2019	Media satyagraha in the broadcast age: underground literature and populist politics during the Indian internal emergency of 1975-77 in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Volume 21, 2019, Issue 7, pp. 942-958 Journal articles An article published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Volume 21, 2019, Issue 7, pp. 942-958
20-Mar-2018	Insurgency in the archives Articles A piece for the British Library's Untold Lives blog on the IAS-UCL workshop, ‘Insurgency in the archives: the politics and aesthetics of sedition in colonial India’ (12-13 January 2018).
25-Sep-2017	Inflammable material in the British Library Articles A piece for the British Library's Untold Lives blog on the British Library's proscribed publications collection.
01-Mar-2017	From Broadcast to Podcast: Reflections on Radio, Resistance and Legacies of the BBC World Service Articles A blog on the role of transnational radio broadcasts in resistance to the Indian emergency of 1975-77, the subject of a paper she presented at a King's College London conference on the legacies of the BBC World Service
02-Mar-2009	Myths of the state fraying at the edges and unravelling at the centre: a comparison of two ‘communal’ riots in Nepalgunj Journal articles An article in a special double edition on 'Revolutionary Nepal'. The European Bulletin of Himalayan Research. Volumes 33-34, autumn 2008 – spring 2009, pp.  73-104

Research Projects & Supervisions

Current PhD topics supervised:

Dates	Details
From: 01-Oct-2024 Until: 31-Aug-2028	A living archive of the British Black Power movement of the 1960s-70s Perry Blankson, an LAHP collaborative doctoral award with the UK National Archives

Available for doctoral supervision: Yes

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