Raju Chalwadi

About Me

I am an ethnographer, teacher and writer, and my work focuses on investigating urban life in Mumbai city. I currently work as a Research Associate with the New Political Economy Initiative, Centre for Liberal Studies at IIT Bombay. In September 2024, I defended my PhD dissertation in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at IIT Bombay. For my doctoral thesis, I used a mixed-methods approach to investigate the urban history and everyday politics of a Dalit (Valmiki) 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 engagement with the caste question in urban South Asia, showing how Dalits mobilise caste in their project of urban citizenship. My research falls under the discipline of Urban Anthropology and at the broader theoretical plane, I wish to enrich our understanding of how cities and communities co-constitute each other.