Book Talk: Professor Sanjay Joshi, "Brahmins of the Himalaya"

Brahmins of the Himalaya: Upper Caste Ways of Belonging 1850-1950 (Permanent Black and SUNY Press, 2026) draws on a rich archive of family letters, including letters by women, and challenges the idea that the everyday can be conflated with the trivial.  Through a focus on the quotidian, Brahmins seeks to challenge the master narratives that have long dominated the history of the subcontinent.

Sanjay Joshi teaches South Asian History at Northern Arizona University and serves as the Ashraf B. Nasir Fellow in the Honors College. He received his BA and MA from the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. in Modern South Asian History from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (Oxford University Press, 2001) and the editor of The Middle Class in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 2010).