Department of History | The University of Chicago

Ron Inden is currently investigating changes inclass formations in India in relation to changes in world ruling classes and the ways in which people have tried to articulate these changes with intellectual practices and national/ethnic "identities" in the twentieth century. He is particularly interested in people's efforts to construct paradises or utopias on earth in and beside their everyday lives.These involve practices ranging from "rituals" in medieval ortraditional societies to the "media" in modern ones and, especiallyin India, the world of cinema. The problems of how people have situatedand resituated these differing practices in a "developing" country like India bring together my historical, anthropological, and Indological interests.

Publications

Imagining India. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990; paperback, March1992.

Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture: A History of Caste and Clan inMiddle Period Bengal. University of California Press, 1975.

"Transcending Identities in Modern India's World," Politics and the Ends of Identity, ed. Kathryn Dean. London, Ashgate, 1997, 64-102.

"Embodying God: From Imperial Progresses to National Progress in India," Economy and Society, 24.2 (May 1995), 245-78.

"Changes in the Vedic Priesthood," Ritual, State and Historyin South Asia: Essays in honour of J. C. Heesterman, ed. A. W. van denHoek, D. H. A. Kolff, & M. S. Oort. Leiden, E. J. Brill,
1992, pp. 556-77.

"Tradition Against Itself," American Ethnologist, XIII.4 (November 1986), 762-75.

"Orientalist Constructions of India," Modern Asian Studies,XX.3 (1986), 401-46.

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Ronald Inden

Professor Emeritus of History and of South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Ph.D. University of Chicago 1972