Chandra Mallampalli holds the Fletcher Jones Foundation Chair of the Social Sciences at Westmont College and is a professor of South Asian history. He is the author of four books 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, British Empire, World History, and Global Christianity. His forthcoming 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 of World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. At HDS, he taught seminars on “Religious Conversion in South Asia” and “Asia and World Christianity.” His next project, “Religion, Law and Cosmopolitanism” examines how religious discourses and laws have either facilitated world citizenship, complex solidarities, and collaboration with religious others or have contributed to cultural and ideological closure or radicalization. The project presents a comparative framework for examining South Asian, European and North American case studies.
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
- “Making Religious Communities,” Cambridge History of the Modern Indian Subcontinent, forthcoming.
- “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.
