Debasreeta Deb

Debasreeta is a PhD scholar at the Centre for Regional Studies, University of Hyderabad, with a research interest in citizenship, migration and the ways in which the state records, regulates, and validates identity. Her doctoral research explores how ordinary people in India experience and negotiate citizenship through the processes of documentation, waiting, and proof-making. Using Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) as a focus, her project examines how citizenship has transformed from a legal or administrative category into a lived, precarious condition, where bureaucratic procedures and the continuous demand for proof create persistent uncertainty and shape people’s sense of belonging. Her research highlights the temporal and affective dimensions of citizenship, considering how state policies, administrative routines, and bureaucratic processes structure experiences of exclusion and insecurity. By situating the NRC within broader historical and global trajectories, the project links India’s documentation regimes to wider discussions on state surveillance, digital identity systems, and bureaucratic governance. It explores how individuals navigate administrative systems, how legal frameworks intersect with social hierarchies, and how protracted bureaucratic processes shape the everyday experience of citizenship. In examining how citizenship is lived, deferred, and contested, this research seeks to illuminate the often-invisible architectures of state power that shape both daily life and the sense of belonging in contemporary India.

With the Inlaks-King’s India Institute Studentship, Debasreeta will be able to access archival collections and consult experts at King’s College London, the British Library, the National Archives at Kew, and other institutions in the UK engaged in research on citizenship, bureaucracy, and migration. The Studentship will also allow her to draw on library collections at the Maughan Library, Cambridge, and Bodleian libraries, giving her access to rare and under-explored materials on postcolonial governance and registration practices. Engaging with these archives and scholarly communities will deepen her understanding of the historical and conceptual dimensions of citizenship in India. By enabling this critical engagement, the Studentship will enhance her project’s ability to contribute meaningfully to wider debates on governance, exclusion, and the temporal politics of belonging.

Amruthraj V G

Amruthraj is a PhD research scholar in sociology at the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. His doctoral research engages with the questions of socio-spatial marginalisation of Dalit housing colonies in Kerala in South India, and how Dalits, when confronted with economic precarity, land alienation and abjection, invoke spatial politics as a response. While critically approaching Kerala’s much celebrated development trajectory, his research also responds to the contemporary calls – both within and outside sociology- to engage with the material embeddedness of caste. Tracing the emergence and continuance of segregated Dalit settlements in Kerala through archival and ethnographic methods, Amruth’s work employs a spatial analytic in examining how state’s welfare rationalities, built environment of colonies and everyday affective-sensory experiences interact together in producing marginality. His fieldwork-based research also explores the ways in which Dalits experience, reproduce and resist these constellations of social exclusion through everyday practises. 

As a recipient of the Inlaks-King’s India Institute Studentship, Amruth will be able to discuss and analyse the ethnographic material from the field alongside archival data with experts at King’s College London and other academic institutions in the United Kingdom. Secondly, the Studentship will facilitate him to access the Crown representatives’ records of Travancore and Cochin and other relevant government ordinances which are preserved in the British library. In addition, the Grant will also enable him to analyse diaries, travel logs, reports and administration documents written by Christian missionaries located in the libraries of School of Oriental and African studies, Oxford University and Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide.  This academic engagement would open up an opportunity for Amruth to closely examine the colonial administration’s conceptualisation of Dalits as a population and their welfare provisioning in early twentieth century Kerala.