Isha Dubey


Assistant Professor
Ph.D (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Research Areas: Memory studies; History of modern and contemporary South Asia; Partition studies; Bangladesh studies; histories of migration; urban history
Email: isha.dubey@iiit.ac.in

I joined the Human Sciences Research Centre at IIIT Hyderabad as a faculty member in history in December 2022.I graduated with a PhD from the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark in October 2017 after completing my MA and BA degrees from Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi respectively. Prior to joining IIIT, I have worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET) at Lund University, Sweden and the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University. The temporal and regional focus of my research is modern and contemporary South Asia, and my work is guided by an overarching interest in Partition and Bangladesh studies, memory studies, diaspora studies, histories of migration, nationalism and communalism and urban history.

Select Publications

  • [Book Chapter] Dubey, Isha. “Muhajir Narratives of Homes Lost and Found: Nostalgia and belonging in the novels of Intizar Husain and the columns of The Daily Pasban. In Migration, Memories and the “Unfinished Partition”, edited by Amit Ranjan (London and New York: Routledge, 2024), 86-107.
  • [Article] Dubey, Isha. “Remembering, Forgetting and Memorialising: 1947, 1971 and the state of memory studies in South Asia.” India Review 20, no. 5 (2021): 510-539.
  • [Article] Dubey, Isha. “Between ‘Everyday’ and ‘Extraordinary’: Partition, violence and the communal riots of 1946 in Bihar.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 30, no. 2(2020): 283-312.
  • [Article] Dubey, Isha. “Navigating the Insider/Outsider Divide: Muhajirs in East Pakistan through the columns of The Daily Pasban,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 78, (2017): 878-885. (awarded the Partha Sarathi Gupta Memorial Prize and the S.C. Jha Memorial Prize)

Projects

  • Constructing the Oceans: Indian Ocean Infrastructures and Thick Transregionalism (CO-OC)

    I am a co-investigator in the Danish Research Council Funded project Constructing the Oceans (CO-OC) – jointly hosted by the departments of Global Studies, Anthropology and Study of Religion at Aarhus University. Applying Engseng Ho’s methodological framework of ‘thick transregionalism’, the project aims to study the social life of infrastructures of a widely dispersed yet cohesive religious community – the Dawoodi Bohras – through simultaneous, multi-sited ethnographies in three littoral locations in the Indian Ocean – Dubai (UAE), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Mumbai (India). Within this larger thematic purview of the CO-OC project, I examine the dynamics of the entanglements between the ‘social’ and the ‘material’ dimensions of Mumbai’s Bhendi Bazaar. More specifically, I focus on the ways in which the Shia Dawoodi Bohras - its most populous and prominent community - inhabit and interact with these two dimensions of the locality both historically and in the present as it goes through a colossal dissembling/re-assembling in the form of a community-led urban redevelopment project.

  • Partition and the Postcolonial Metropolis: Migration, Memory and Urbanism in post-1947 Bombay

    India's independence from colonial rule in 1947 came with the colossal cost of a monumental redrawing of borders and the carving out of a new state - Pakistan - which itself comprised of two wings flanking India on either sides. What followed was human displacement on a scale unprecedented in recent history across the world with animatedly more than 15 million people moving across the newly created borders on both sides leading to dislocation, chaos, communal violence and intergenerational historical trauma that continues to shape the narrative of post-colonial South Asia. Partition-related migration changed and impacted socio-cultural dynamics across cities in both India and Pakistan. The influx of incoming refugees into these two newly created states gave birth to both problems and possibilities that would continue to haunt and shape the cities which they 'settled' in over the years and decades that followed. In recent years, there has emerged a considerable amount of scholarship on how cities such as Kolkata, Delhi, Dhaka and Karachi were unmade and remade by partition refugees and the complex relationship that they forged with the 'host' communities in them. However, even as the field of Partition studies has examined the role it played in transforming the nature of urbanism and urbanisation in South Asia, the focus has largely been on cities which were more directly and immediately effected by the dislocations and violence of 1947. This project, funded by a seed grant from IIIT Hyderabad, seeks to address this gap in scholarship by looking at how the Partition and partition-related migration shaped post-colonial Bombay (now Mumbai) - A metropolis far away from the refashioned borders on either side and yet central to the Partition story on account of the cosmopolitan modernity that it has historically embodied. Located at the interface of social and cultural history, memory studies and urban studies and drawing on the methodologies of archival research, ethnography and oral history the project shall examine the place that the Partition occupies in Bombay's collective memory and the extent to which its specific urbanism reflects partition-related histories of mobility across communities and localities.
    Project staff: Dr. Chandni Shiyal (Research Associate)

Research Students

  • Maharnav Singhal

Research Supervision Interests

  • Migration and displacement in South Asia
  • Memory politics
  • Histories of conflict and reconciliation
  • Communalism and communal violence
  • Nationalism and identity politics in South Asia
  • Social change and social memory in urban India