Prof. Ravi Ahuja

Prof. Ravi Ahuja is a historian and currently the head of the research group ‘Modern Indian History’ at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) of Georg-August-University Göttingen. After teaching at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg and conducting research at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin he was appointed Professor of Modern South Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. He joined CeMIS as its founding director in 2009. His research is based on the assumption that social practices create their own spaces of relevance. These spaces of relevance can be ascertained, conversely, only in the process of reconstructing the history of social relations. No fixed territorial or local or even global ‘frame’ can, therefore, be presupposed and imposed upon the social historian’s material. While specializing on modern South Asian history, he has used this approach in a variety of research projects: the social history of Indian steamship labour under British imperialism, the social history of infrastructure, the experiences of South Asian soldiers in World War I Europe and most recently postcolonial India’s regime of labor regulation in global context.