Sarath Pillai

Biography

Sarath Pillai is a historian of modern South Asia, focusing on the history of federalism and Indian Princely states. His first monograph, tentatively titled "United States of India: A Global History of Federation in South Asia," offers one of the first historical accounts of Indian federalism. It examines an alternative world of federalist ideas that held sway in colonial India from the 1900s through the 1940s and how these ideas impacted India's founding and postcolonial trajectory. The book's narrative arc is centered on protagonists who are usually sidelined in the triumphal narratives of the Indian nation-state--such as leaders of the Indian Princely states, Muslim minorities, liberals, lawyers, and vernacular intellectuals and politicians. The book draws on multilingual archives in India, the UK, and the US, collected over a period of twenty months, and is based on his PhD dissertation in History, completed with distinction at the University of Chicago. His dissertation was awarded the 2022 Sardar Patel Award for the best dissertation on Modern India in any humanities or social sciences discipline in the US by UCLA.

Before joining SMU, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. At CASI, he coordinated a seminar series featuring both in-person and virtual talks on modern India. In Philadelphia, he completed two major public history initiatives at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) as an intern. First, he wrote the first-ever South Asia Subject guide for HSP, giving an overarching view of its South Asia collections from the 17th century to the present. Second, he inventoried the private papers of Harry Adamson, a Philadelphia-based activist who was infected with HIV in 1982 and died in 2021. His papers are an unusual window to the world of gay rights, medical care, and the AIDS pandemic in Philadelphia. He was elected for a two-year term as the first-ever postdoctoral representative to sit on the University Council--the highest and widely deliberative body of the University of Pennsylvania--representing over 1400 postdocs on campus.

He was a Fellow at the Hurst Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin Law School in 2021. His research has been supported by the American Historical Association, Center for International Social Science Research, Social Sciences Research Center, Committee on Southern Asian Studies, Nicholson Center for British Studies, Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund for Research at Yale Law School, Humboldt-Yale History Network Travel Grant, Florence Tan Moeson Fellowship at the Library of Congress, Harry S Truman Library and Princeton University Library.

Publications

Peer-reviewed

2023 "German Lessons: Comparative Constitutionalism, States’ Rights, and Federalist Imaginaries in Interwar India," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 65.4 (2023): 801–827.

2021 “Archiving Federally, Writing Regionally: Archival Practices and Princely State Histories in Postcolonial India,” Archives and Records 42.2 (Oct. 2021): 149-166.

2016 “Fragmenting the Nation: Divisible Sovereignty and Travancore’s Quest for Federal Independence,” Law and History Review 34.3 (Aug. 2016): 743-782.

Selected Book Reviews

2023 “The Politics of Democratic Planning in Postcolonial India,” Review of Planning Democracy: How a Professor, an Institute, and an Idea Shaped India, by Nikhil Menon, Himal Southasian, April 25, 2023

2022 “Politics, Law, and ‘Founding Moments’ in Late Colonial India,” review of Norms and Politics: Sir B. N. Rau in the Making of the Indian Constitution, by Arvind Elangovan, The New Rambler, August 24, 2022.

2015 Review of A Political Legacy of the British Empire: Power and the Parliamentary System in Post-colonial India and Sri Lanka, by Harshan Kumarasingham, South Asia Research 35.2 (July 2015): 272-76.

2014 Review of Princely India and the British: Political Development and the Operation of Empire, by Caroline Keen, South Asia Research 34.2 (July 2014): 183-86.

2013 “Princely Modernity: A Mysorean Perspective,” review of Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule, by Janaki Nair, Economic and Political Weekly 48.22 (March 23, 2013): 33-36.

Recent Public Writing

Subject Guide to South Asia Collections, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

2023 “Union Against Center: The Political Language of Federalism in India,” India in Transition, Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), University of Pennsylvania, February 27, 2023. (Republished in The Wire, The News Minute, and Scroll.in, and translated into Hindi, Bangla, and Tamil)

2022 “Amar Farooqui: A historian’s indelible legacy and lessons to last a lifetime,” Scroll.in, December 19, 2022.

2022 “How the princely states, used by Britain to consolidate its empire, faded into obscurity,” Scroll.in, November 24, 2022.

2021 “Archival Futures: The Archive as a Place and the Place of the Archive,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 16, 2021.

2020 “Is this the right time for India to debate swapping its parliamentary system for a presidential one?” Scroll.in, Sept. 13, 2020.

2020 “Kashmir and the Forgotten History of India’s Princely States,” The Diplomat, August 4, 2020.

2020 “Of Genealogy and Land Deeds: Some Thoughts on Family Histories in Kerala,” Ala: A Kerala Studies Blog, June 30, 2020.