Raju Chalwadi

About Me

I am an ethnographer, teacher and writer, and my work focuses on investigating urban life in Mumbai city. I recently defended my PhD dissertation in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at IIT Bombay, India. For my doctoral thesis, I used a mixed-methods approach to investigate the urban career and everyday politics of a Dalit community in Mumbai. For the academic year 2022-2023, I was awarded the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellowship to write my dissertation at the University of California, Santa Cruz, CA. I am currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled "How do Stigmatised Communities Make Cities? An Ethnography of the Spatial and Cultural Politics of Valmikis in Mumbai". My book project promises to bring a fresh perspective on Dalit's engagement with the caste question in urban South Asia, showing how Dalits mobilise caste in their project of urban citizenship. I was born and brought up in Mumbai. I was fascinated by the city life and the possibilities it offers to its inhabitants. How do urban poor living across Mumbai’s low-income settlements cement their relationship with the city? This question remained central to me, and I began my research career with Mumbai as my field. My research broadly falls under the discipline of Urban Anthropology. At the broader theoretical plane, I wish to enrich our understanding of how cities and communities co-constitute each other.