Meet Our New Faculty | Dr. Salmoli Choudhuri

1. Can you tell us more about yourself and your work?

I was born and raised in Kolkata and moved to Delhi for college education. After completing an integrated undergraduate degree in law and humanities at NLU Delhi, I briefly worked as a legal associate in the Delhi office of the law firm Amarchand Mangaldas. Realizing that my true calling was academics, I went back to NLU Delhi to teach legal history and simultaneously pursued an LLM specializing in Public Law. Following this, I read for BCL at the University of Oxford on a Felix Scholarship where I studied jurisprudence and political theory, constitutional theory, comparative equality law, and law in society. After receiving a robust training in analytical theory, I moved to the University of Cambridge to pursue an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies on a Malaysian Commonwealth Studies bursary.

During my MPhil year, I wrote a dissertation on Rabindranath Tagore’s idea of state, society and nation, that received the CA Bayly prize for best dissertation. For a more in-depth intellectual engagement with the questions that my MPhil project threw up, I undertook doctoral studies at the Faculty of History in Cambridge, funded by the Cambridge Trust scholarship. My PhD thesis reconstructs Tagore as an original thinker of selfhood, sovereignty, law, freedom and universality. It shows how he went beyond the formal boundaries of politics to remake the  scope and terms of the political through his critical and creative engagement with religion, education, philosophy and aesthetics. While I have been shaped by all the cities and institutions I have inhabited thus far, my doctoral experience has been the most fulfilling. It has enabled me to finally bring together my interest in history, law and politics on the one hand, and theory, philosophy and humanities on the other, in an original way.

2. What are your main areas of interest and teaching? How did your interest in these areas begin?

I am a historian of legal and political thought researching on the key ideas that have shaped democratic and constitutional cultures of modern South Asia in the progressively global context of colonialism and capitalism from the 18t to the 20th centuries. Sidestepping the usual characterization of this period as one only marked by coercive violence, my scholarship shows how an active intellectual ferment in the Indian subcontinent fostered new ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity that did not depend on a wholesale rejection or acceptance of their European origin and history. Situating myself in the new and important scholarship of canonizing South Asian political thought, I interpret and analyze the practical choices made by Indian actors and thinkers, shot with both realism and idealism, that produced radically modified political and moral visions and vocabularies.

At Cambridge, I have taught courses on “Gandhi and self-rule”, modules on fundamental political concepts in world history in “Historical Arguments and Practices” and “Theory and Practice in History and Politics”. I have also taught and supervised papers on modern India and the global history of empires.

On developing interest in these areas:

Despite a solid legal education in India and the UK, I wanted to go beyond its abstract generality and therefore turned to the social sciences for a more grounded approach to the study of law, history and politics. Gradually, with a keen interest in humanities and philosophy, I have been able to bring my love for ideas and context together in a rich  intellectual framework. This renewed turn to theory would not have been possible without the fertile and creative space of imagination provided by the Cambridge historians of political thought.

4. What will you be teaching at NLS?

In keeping with my interest in Public Law, I am currently teaching Indian Administrative Law in the March 2023 term. The birth of modern administrative law involved the state shedding its laissez-faire orientation towards society and assuming a more active interventionist role in providing social and economic services to the people. Administrative law not only studies the architecture of the state associated with the welfare function but also its legal regulation based on different techniques and principles.

In the terms ahead, I hope to offer other core courses in public law, including, constitutional law and comparative law, as well as electives on my area of specialization in the history of political thought. I wish to offer courses on topics such as “Gandhi, Tagore and self-rule”, “Sex and gender in Indian Political Thought” and the “Intellectual history of freedom in the non-west”.

5. Your thoughts on starting your teaching journey at NLS? What are your plans ahead?

I joined NLS not only for its traditional pedigree as India’s premiere law school but also because this would give me an opportunity to teach and engage with some of the best students in the country who are equally representative of its social diversity. Moreover, I look forward to a generative intellectual exchange with an exciting bunch of colleagues both in law as well as the social sciences.

Other than teaching, my future plan is to pursue further research, including, converting my doctoral thesis into a monograph on Tagore’s political thought, and additionally, writing standalone articles on select themes in law, history and politics.

6. Could you highlight some of your key projects or publications?

My five key publications in the recent years are:

• Salmoli Choudhuri (2021). “Theology of the “Absent King” and the Possibility of Rabindranath Tagore’s Political Thought.” Political Theology.
• Salmoli Choudhuri (2021). “Book Review: Imre Bangha (Ed.) Tagore. Beyond His Language.” South Asia Research Vol 41, No. 3: 440–43. 
• Salmoli Choudhuri (2021). “Gender conflict over temple entry and the limits of legalizing identity politics in contemporary India.” Political Theology Network  (co-authored). 
• Salmoli Choudhuri (2016). “Ambedkar’s Liberty Concept in Comparative Constitutional Thought.” Indian Yearbook of Comparative Law (Oxford University Press) (co-authored).
• Salmoli Choudhuri (2023, forthcoming). “Sovereignty Before Law.” Global Intellectual History (co-authored).

To view more of her publications, please visit her faculty profile.