Rama Sundari Mantena, PhD
Professor
History (South Asia, India, British Empire)
Contact
Building & Room:
929 UH
Address:
601 S Morgan St.
Email:
Office Hours
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| Wednesday | 10:00am – 11:30am | |
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About
As a historian of modern South Asia, Rama Mantena's research encompasses the study of anticolonial nationalism, linguistic nationalism, the public sphere and print in colonial South India, practices of democracy in modern India, and historical methods and practices. Her first book, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780-1880 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), examines the emergence of modern practices of history writing and methods of arriving at historical truth in colonial India to illuminate a persistent problem confronting the field of Indian intellectual history: the idea that in Indian textual traditions one must find equivalents for historical developments in Western European history. The book documents how British scholars examined the contemporary and past cultural, political and legal institutions of colonial societies by looking for what they knew had existed in European history. The book then foregrounds how Indians and their entanglements with colonial practices of history forged new methods of collecting, surveying, and writing history in the early colonial period in south India. Mantena's second book, Provincial Democracy: Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire in Twentieth-century South India (Cambridge University Press, 2023), is on the history and practice of democracy in South India and the global dimensions of that history in the era of decolonization. The study (based on rarely consulted primary sources) examines the political imaginaries of the princely state of Hyderabad with its unique relationship within the British Empire and vis-a-vis British Indian political and social movements.
At UIC, she teaches courses on Modern India, nationalism, colonialism, the British Empire, and women and gender in Indian history.
Selected Publications
“‘A People’s Literature’: Reimagining Telugu Literary History.” In Indian Modernities: Literary Cultures from 18th to 20th century, ed. Nishat Zaidi (Routledge, 2023).
“Publicity, civil liberties and political life in Princely Hyderabad,” Modern Asian Studies 53(4), (2019): 1248-1277.
“Anti-colonialism and Federation in Colonial India,” Ab Imperio 3/2018, 36-62
“The Andhra Movement, Hyderabad State and the Historical Origins of the Telangana Demand: Public Life And Political Aspirations in India, 1900-1956,” India Review, vol. 13, no. 4 (2014), 337-357.
“Vernacular Publics and Political Modernity: Language and Progress in Colonial South India.” Modern Asian Studies 47, 5 (2013), 1678–1705.
“The Origins of Modern Historiography and Indian Intellectual History,” a special issue on the work of Professor Velcheru Narayana Rao in eemaata: a telugu webzine for a world without borders (January 2013).
The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780-1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). For a review of the book, see The American Historical Review 118, 2 (2013), 501-502.
“Imperial Ideology and the Uses of Rome in Discourses on Britain’s Indian Empire.” In Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire, ed. Mark Bradley (Oxford University Press, 2010), 54-73.
“The Question of History in Pre-colonial India.” History and Theory 46 (2007), 396-408.