Chandra Mallampalli is the author of four historical monographs and many articles, which examine the intersection of religion, law, and society in colonial South India. His scholarship and teaching span the fields of modern India, the British Empire, World History, and Global Christianity. His first three books examine the evolution of Christian, Muslim and Hindu identities in relation to legal and political policies and print media. His most recent book with Oxford University Press (New York), South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim, describes how the lives of Christians have been shaped by centuries of interactions with Hindus and Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. In 2021-22 Professor Mallampalli was an inaugural Yang Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School. He is currently (2023-24) a research scholar at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College where he explores challenges facing India’s diverse democracy. His next project, “The Virtues of Mixture: Religion, Labor Migrants and Cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean” examines the experiences of cultural and racial mixture among South Indian labor migrants to West and Southeast Asia, and whether their religious commitments either facilitated or impeded their capacity for world citizenship, as measured by complex solidarities, affective ties, and interreligious collaboration.
Selected publications
- South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim (Oxford University Press, 2023)
- A Muslim Conspiracy in British India? Politics and Paranoia in the Early 19th Century Deccan (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
- Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India: Trials of an Interracial Family (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
- Christians and Public Life in Colonial South India: Contending with Marginality (Routledge, 2004)
See also
- “Minority Vulnerability in South Asia and China, in International Journal of Asian Christianity (2023).
- “Reexamining Cultural Accommodation and Difference in the Historiography of South Indian Catholicism,” Madras Institute of Development Studies, December 2019.
- “Slaying Men with Faces of Women: Liberalism and Patronage in the Trial of a Vellore Maulvi, 1839-40,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 51, No. 3, May 2017.
- “A Fondness for Military Display: Conquest and Intrigue in South India during the First Anglo-Afghan War, 1839-40,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 77, No.1 (Feb. 2018), 139-159.
