Ahona Panda, Ph.D.

I am a historian of modern South Asia and the British empire. I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in 2019.

I am currently working on my book manuscript, provisionally titled Bengal Undivided: Language and the Limits of Nationalism, in which I rewrite the Hindu Muslim relationship in modern South Asia by considering language as an axis of political and moral identity. I push against the prevailing understandings of Hindu-Muslim politics as one premised on violence, conflict and fragmentation on the grounds of religious difference. Instead, I challenge historical accounts of both religious and linguistic ethnonationalisms, by offering a story of friendship and fraught intimacy, mediated through the shared language Bengali. Cutting across the national narratives (and archives) of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Bengal Undivided argues that language can act as a powerful moral force in political life, such that enemies are transformed into friends. This book is based on my dissertation "Philology and the Politics of Language: The Case of Bengali, 1893-1955" that won the 2020 Sardar Patel Award, awarded by the Centre of India and South Asia at UCLA, for best doctoral dissertation on any aspect of modern India across the social sciences, humanities, education and fine arts - in any U.S. University or academic institution awarding the Ph.D.

My second book project arises out of my travels across rural and small town West Bengal and Bangladesh, where multiple histories of people and places lie entangled in historic sites across an international border. I will use a microhistorical approach to write the local stories of a few regions/towns and their adjacent rivers, including Murshidabad (India), Sylhet (Bangladesh), Chittagong (Bangladesh), and the Sunderbans (the mangrove forests that stand on the interface of the Bay of Bengal and both India and Bangladesh). Through a close examination of material and oral histories, as well as written sources in Bengali and Persian, as well as English, French, Portuguese and Armenian, I will trace how these local regions transformed socially, economically and environmentally, with the advent of the Europeans and Armenians in the global seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I am especially invested in thinking about the shared histories/memories and environmental challenges that remain across the divided nation-states in the twenty-first century. 

I teach both broad survey and specialised seminars on South Asian history at the Claremont colleges. My courses encompass colonialism and nationalism, gender in South Asian civilizational history, legal regimes and censorship, and the intertwined histories of race, labour, migration, and capitalism in the modern period.

Courses Offered:

Makers of Modern India and Pakistan (Seminar)

Sex and Censorship in South Asia (Special Topics/Research Seminar)

History from Below (Advanced Research Seminar) 

Introduction to Modern South Asia (Seminar) 

Caste, Race and Equality (First-year Humanities Seminar)

Gender and History in South Asia (Seminar)