Princeton University

Bhavani Raman specializes in modern South Asian history. Her research focuses on scribal culture, education and bureaucracy under East India Company rule in early nineteenth century South India. Her teaching interests include colonialism and language politics, textual practices in South Asia, post-colonial criticism of historiography, and historical anthropology. She joined the history department at Princeton in the fall of 2007. She is currently working on a book based on her dissertation.
A South Indian who grew up in New Delhi, Professor Raman is fluent in Tamil and Hindi.  She graduated with a B.A. in History from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University in 1995 and received an MA and M.Phil in Modern Indian History from the Center for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal University, New Delhi. Professor Raman completed her doctoral degree at the History Department at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2007.  Her doctoral research was supported by grants from The Social Science Research Council, New York, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, Chicago. Professor Raman was also a graduate fellow at the Institute of Humanities at the University of Michigan.

Professor Raman is working on a book based on her dissertation entitled “Document Raj: Scribes and Writing in Company Rule Madras, 1780-1860.” She examines the relationship between graphic culture and the making of the English East India Company’s early colonial regime in the Tamil region in the nineteenth century. She looks at how the establishment of a new culture of writing and recordkeeping was integral to the establishment of early colonial rule reorganizing and transforming extant scribal ideologies and practices.

Teaching Interests: Professor Raman is teaching a junior seminar in the fall of 2006, “The Making of Evidence and the Writing of History.” She plans to teach a lecture on “The Mughals and their World, 1526-1858 A.D.” in the spring of 2008.

Book Review, “Decentering Empire,” Hardt and Negri, “Empire,” in
Antipode, March 2002.

Book Review, “Subramaniam N. “Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization:
Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India,” in
Comparative Studies in Society and History, October 2001.