Dr. Dayal Paleri

Education

• Integrated Master’s in Political Science from the University of Hyderabad
• PhD in Political Science from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras

Profile

Dayal Paleri was previously a Commonwealth Split-site PhD fellow at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK, and a recipient of the Institute Research (IR) Award for Excellence in PhD Research by the Dean Academic Research at IIT Madras. He has previously taught Political Science and Sociology courses at DoHSS-IIT Madras and the National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning-IIT Madras as a Teaching Assistant.

His research interests include Indian Politics and Governance, Political Sociology of Religion and Nonreligion, Peace Studies, New Atheism, and State and Civil Society in Postcolonial Kerala. Given his interdisciplinary training in Social Sciences, his PhD research examined the political process of inter-religious peacebuilding in central Kerala, employing ethnographic methods. Currently, he is engaged in collaborative research on the emergence and articulations of new atheism in Kerala (with IIT Madras and the University of Zurich) and on minority representation in liberal democracies (with Dalhousie University).

Publications

• Dayal Paleri and Santhosh R. (2023). ‘Elections can wait!’ The politics of constructing a ‘Hindu atmosphere’ in Kerala, South India. Modern Asian Studies, 57(6):2067-2099 (Cambridge University Press)
• Dayal Paleri. (2023). Crisis as Opportunity: The Politics of ‘Seva’ and the Hindu Nationalist Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Kerala, South India. Religions (MDPI), 14 (6), 799.
• R Santhosh and Dayal Paleri. (2021). Ethnicization of religion in practice? Recasting competing communal mobilizations in coastal Karnataka, South India. Ethnicities (Sage Publications) 21(3), 563–588.
• R Santhosh and Dayal Paleri. (2021). Crisis of Secularism and Changing Contours of Minority Politics in India: Lessons from the Analysis of a Muslim Political Organization. Asian Survey (University of California Press) 61 (6), 999-1027.

• Dayal Paleri. (2022). The New Hindutva and Its Contradictions, Economic and Political Weekly, 57 (19), 26-18.
• Dayal Paleri (2022) Hindutva Growth Story. The Wire. 21 August 2022

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