Meet Our New Faculty | Dr. Kena Wani

Can you tell us more about yourself/your background?

I grew up in Baroda, Gujarat. However, my pursuits in higher education and academia have taken me to Pune, Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Durham, and now Bangalore. Despite this rather peripatetic trajectory, my research work is primarily concerned with certain places in Gujarat where I have spent most of my childhood and young adult life. My initial impulse to critically scrutinize a familiar region stemmed from a deep desire to unsettle the idea of “home,” and to think of it beyond the affective registers of comfort and belonging, perhaps even make room for “unbelonging?” Ironically, it was only through this intellectual exercise of rendering the most familiar—into something unfamiliar—that I was able to make sense of the social, political, and the cultural world that I grew up in. While my research concerns and curiosities have changed and expanded over the years, I attribute my initial interest in Social Sciences (both Political Science and History) broadly to this underlying-persistent-gnawing urge to critique the structures and institutions of power that surround us, and understand the social and political costs that they have often exacted.

Outside academia, I am bound by eternal service and duty to my eighteen-year-old cat.

What are your main areas of interest and teaching?

My research examines the intersections between state, business, and development practices in the middle decades of the twentieth century, specifically in Ahmedabad and its surrounding rural/agrarian regions. I study these intersections against the backdrop of waning imperialism and ascending nationalism, a shifting postcolonial regime marked by dirigisme, as well as the global context of the Cold War and its accompanying matrix of multilateral institutions. I further situate my analysis within a longer history of merchant capitalism and commerce in western India. In doing so, my work critically studies a varied range of developmental programmes in mid-twentieth-century western India and their underlying technocratic and managerialist lineages.

My teaching and research areas include 19th and 20th century histories of India across the colonial and post-independence divide with a focus on capitalism, twentieth century developmentalism, rural and agrarian reforms, labour and automation, and histories of technocracy, bureaucracy, and business. In the past, I have taught core history courses on Modern India and South Asia, as well as a varied range of electives that focus on global histories of development and state-making practices in twentieth century. I have also taught a course on histories of social movements and revolutions, and another one on politics and the writing of history in India.

What will you be teaching at NLS?

I will be teaching History I and History II (core) courses to the 5-year BA LLB (Hons) students. I will also be offering electives for students enrolled in other programmes here. This year, I envision teaching an elective course on the Global History of Development. Traversing the Great Depression of the interwar period, the formation of the postcolonial states in mid-twentieth century, to the Green Revolution policies of the 1960s, the course will introduce students to the historical processes and intellectual ideas that have shaped the limits and possibilities of development in twentieth century. The course will allow students to think of development—one of the most ubiquitous terms used in popular parlance as well as public policy rhetoric—not as a self-evident socio-economic fact, but as a historically complex phenomenon which acquired salience over the long twentieth century. I also intend to offer a course at some point on the history of machines, labour, and work.

Given the centrality of the idea of the historical precedent in law, an engagement with the past for understanding the present is not an entirely new proposition for a classroom in a law school. My courses will critically expand upon this logic of historical thinking by going beyond the singular and often illustrative notion of the precedent. Instead, it will prod students to think of history and its entanglements with the present through the frames of continuities/discontinuities, contingencies, and contradictions.

Pedagogically, my courses aim to help students make sense of the complex world that we inhabit and the inequities that run through it. A historical sensibility is crucial for cultivating this understanding as it allows us to see how certain structures of power that penetrate our everyday lives are made/unmade, sustained, and even challenged over a period of time.

Your thoughts on starting your teaching journey at NLS:

I am excited about teaching at a public university. After having taught at private institutions for a few years, I look forward to teaching in a public university classroom which promises to have a much more diverse student composition. I am also curious to see how my engagement with law in the classroom with my students, and outside of it with my colleagues, will shape my own intellectual queries.

Could you highlight some of your key projects or publications?

Recently, I have published two articles. The first is titled “Trustees of the Nation? Business, Philanthropy and Changing Modes of Legitimacy in Colonial and Postcolonial Western India”. The paper looks at the history of philanthropic capital in western India and its socio-legal modes of accumulation.

The second is titled “Pedagogies of Development, Conceptions of Efficiency: Modern Managerialism in Industrial Ahmedabad, 1950s–1960s.” This paper traces the historical trajectory of management as a professional discipline in the post-independence period in India. It tracks the discipline’s formative interests in the management of industrial labour, and the intersection of certain larger managerial concerns with the globally emergent discourses on development and industrial reform. The article also follows the eventual institutionalization of the discipline as an educational concern through the setting up of management schools. Broadly, I argue that management in the mid-twentieth century functioned as a solution in search of a problem. It acquired prominence by tautologically reading institutions and various aspects of the society as organizations that needed the prescription of management to resolve their operations.

To know more about her published work, please visit her Kena’s faculty page.