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Biography

Sarath Pillai is a historian of modern South Asia, focusing on the history of federalism and Indian Princely states. His first monograph, tentatively titled "United States of India: A Global History of Federation in South Asia," offers one of the first historical accounts of Indian federalism. It examines an alternative world of federalist ideas that held sway in colonial India from the 1900s through the 1940s and how these ideas impacted India's founding and postcolonial trajectory. The book's narrative arc is centered on protagonists who are usually sidelined in the triumphal narratives of the Indian nation-state--such as leaders of the Indian Princely states, Muslim minorities, liberals, lawyers, and vernacular intellectuals and politicians. The book draws on multilingual archives in India, the UK, and the US, collected over a period of twenty months, and is based on his PhD dissertation in History, completed with distinction at the University of Chicago. His dissertation was awarded the 2022 Sardar Patel Award for the best dissertation on Modern India in any humanities or social sciences discipline in the US by UCLA.

Before joining SMU, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. At CASI, he coordinated a seminar series featuring both in-person and virtual talks on modern India. In Philadelphia, he completed two major public history initiatives at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) as an intern. First, he wrote the first-ever for HSP, giving an overarching view of its South Asia collections from the 17th century to the present. Second, he inventoried the , a Philadelphia-based activist who was infected with HIV in 1982 and died in 2021. His papers are an unusual window to the world of gay rights, medical care, and the AIDS pandemic in Philadelphia. He was elected for a two-year term as the first-ever postdoctoral representative to sit on the --the highest and widely deliberative body of the University of Pennsylvania--representing over 1400 postdocs on campus.

He was a Fellow at the Hurst Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin Law School in 2021. His research has been supported by the , , , , , at Yale Law School, , at the Library of Congress, and .

Publications

Peer-reviewed

2023 "" Comparative Studies in Society and History, 65.4 (2023): 801–827.

2021 “” Archives and Records 42.2 (Oct. 2021): 149-166.

2016 “” Law and History Review 34.3 (Aug. 2016): 743-782.

Selected Book Reviews

2023 “” Review of Planning Democracy: How a Professor, an Institute, and an Idea Shaped India, by Nikhil Menon, Himal Southasian, April 25, 2023

2022 “” review of Norms and Politics: Sir B. N. Rau in the Making of the Indian Constitution, by Arvind Elangovan, The New Rambler, August 24, 2022.

2015 , by Harshan Kumarasingham, South Asia Research 35.2 (July 2015): 272-76.

2014 , by Caroline Keen, South Asia Research 34.2 (July 2014): 183-86.

2013 “” review of Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule, by Janaki Nair, Economic and Political Weekly 48.22 (March 23, 2013): 33-36.

Recent Public Writing

, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

2023 “” India in Transition, Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), University of Pennsylvania, February 27, 2023. (Republished in The Wire, The News Minute, and Scroll.in, and translated into Hindi, Bangla, and Tamil)

2022 “” Scroll.in, December 19, 2022.

2022 “” Scroll.in, November 24, 2022.

2021 “” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 16, 2021.

2020 “” Scroll.in, Sept. 13, 2020.

2020 “” The Diplomat, August 4, 2020.

2020 “” Ala: A Kerala Studies Blog, June 30, 2020.