Pradyumna Jairam
Key information
- Roles
- Department of Politics and International Studies Teaching Fellow
- Email address
- pj11@soas.ac.uk
Biography
Dr. Pradyumna Jairam is a Teaching Fellow for the Undergraduate module 'International Relations of South Asia', a role which he first began in January 2022. He is also an Hourly Paid Lecturer with the Department of War Studies, Kings College London, where he also was a Graduate Teaching Assistant during his doctoral research from 2017 to 2021. He is a Yearly Visiting Lecturer at City University, where convenes the compulsory MSc module 'Professional Studies', focusing on the essentials of academic research.
His PhD is in the fields of Politics and Education. His research examines how school history textbooks are used to construct national identities of belonging and exclusion in India, through a case study of the Indian state of Rajasthan. It uncovers how national histories are regionalized in the eyes of the nation's two main national political parties - The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress.
He holds and MPhil in International Relations, with specialization in European Studies, as well as an MA in Modern Indian History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. He obtained a BA (Hons) in History from the University of Delhi.
Key publications
Public writing
- BJP has been effective in transmitting its version of Indian history to next generation of learners”, Co-written with Prof. Christophe Jaffrelot, The Indian Express, November 16, 2019
- “Teachers Don’t Need Recognition — They Need a Democratic Classroom”, The Quint, September 5, 2019
- “CBSE paper leak: Why students need to stay angry and keep fighting”, DailyO, April 4, 2018
- “How to Engage Critically with History in Indian Schools”, The Asia Dialogue, Asia Research Institute, University of Nottingham, February 21, 2018
- “The University: The Last Pillar of Democracy”, The Asia Dialogue, Asia Research Institute,
- University of Nottingham, March 3, 2017
Public outreach
- Creating Majoritarian Identity Through a Regional Lens : Half Time Scholars Podcast, August 2022
- Rebuilding the Hindutva History , EU-India Peoples Summit, May 2021
- Lies My Teacher Told Me, Saffronising History, BBC Radio, London, January 2020
- Our Education System produces people that are either Indifferent to Caste oppression or Oblivious to it”, The Polis Project Podcast Series, December 2019
Research interests
Education and Nationalism, Modern and Contemporary South Asia, Politics of History Writing