Dr Nandini Chatterjee
Senior Lecturer
Extension: 5067
Telephone: 01392 725067
I work on law and cultural exchanges in the British and Mughal empires - with particular attention to religious identities, family formation, and the styling of selves. My first book was on the shaping on the minority religious community of Indian Christians, through legal, political, racial and theological contests over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am currently involved in two overlapping but also extremely divergent projects.
The first looks at the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, erstwhile final court of appeal of the British empire, and its role as a hub of legal, social and cultural interactions with empire-wide implications. In this connection, I am particularly interested in the role and place of Islam - including Anglo-Muhammadan law, eminent Muslim judges, and key cases involving either or both. In collaboration with Dr Charlotte Smith of Reading University, I have created an online catalogue of historic Privy Council papers.
The other and newer project is based on Persian manuscript sources and looks at judges, litigants and state officials in the late Mughal empire, that is, from late seventeenth century until it (officially) gave way to the British empire the mid-nineteenth century.
