On Leave 2025-2026
Education
M.A. Jawaharlal Nehru University
M.Phil. Jawaharlal Nehru University, History
Ph.D. University of London, History
Courses
HIST 117 / ASIA 117 / GBST 117 SEM
Bombay/Mumbai: Making of a Modern Metropolis (not offered 2025/26)HIST 220 / ASIA 222 LEC
History and Society in India and South Asia: c. 2000 to 1700s CE (not offered 2025/26)HIST 221 / ASIA 221 / GBST 221 LEC
South Asia: Colonialism to Independence, 1750-1947 CE (not offered 2025/26)HIST 314 / ARTH 314 / ASIA 314 SEM
Emperors of Heaven and Earth: Mughal Power and Art in India, 1525-1707 (not offered 2025/26)HIST 391 / ASIA 391 / CAOS 391 SEM
When India was the World: Trade, Travel and History in the Indian Ocean (not offered 2025/26)Biography
Aparna Kapadia (Ph. D., SOAS, University of London, 2010) is a social historian of early modern and modern South Asia. Her research particularly focuses on western Indian regional cultures, identities, and power structures as well as the subcontinent’s links with the Indian Ocean networks.
Her most recent book, In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth–Century Gujarat (Cambridge University Press, 2018), shifts the conventional focus on the Delhi-centered empires and investigates the fascinating world of Gujarat’s royal courts, including those of the Rajput chieftains and the regional sultans, through close readings of rarely used literary works in Sanskrit and Gujarati. Kapadia is also the co-editor of The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text (Orient Blackswan, 2010).
Kapadia also serves as on editorial board of The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (JRAS)’s Editorial Board and writes a column on history called Off Centre for Scroll.in.
In 2025-26, she will be The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. There she will work on a biography of Kasturba Gandhi (1869–1944) that uses new archival research to examine her activism within the broader context of women’s leadership in India’s anticolonial movement. This research has also been supported by a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award.
Selected Publications
Kapadia, Aparna. “Imagining Region in Late Colonial India: Jhaverchand Meghani and the Construction of Saurashtra (1921–47).” The Journal of Asian Studies, 2022, 81.3:541–560.
Kapadia, Aparna, In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-Century Gujarat. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Kapadia, Aparna, ‘Universal Poet, Local Kings: Sanskrit, the Rhetoric of Kingship and Local Kingdoms in Gujarat’ in Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh (eds), After Timur Left: Multiple Spaces of Cultural Production and Circulation in Fifteenth-century North India, OUP, New Delhi, 2014.
Kapadia, Aparna, ‘The Last Cakravartin?: The Gujarat Sultan as ‘Universal King’ in Fifteenth Century Sanskrit Poetry’, Medieval History Journal, vol. 16, no. 1 (April 2013):63-88.
Kapadia, Aparna, ‘Alexander Forbes and the Making of a Regional History,’ in Edward Simpson and Aparna Kapadia (eds), The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010.
Simpson, Edward and Aparna Kapadia (eds), The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010.
Kapadia, Aparna, ‘What Makes the Head Turn: The Narratives of Kānhaḍade and the Dynamics of Legitimacy in Western India’, SAGAR, vol. 18, Spring 2008, pp. 87-100.
Research Interests
South Asian history, literary and popular culture, biography, Indian Ocean history, history of food and culinary practices.
Theses Advised
Benjamin Platt ’23
Stable Foundations: The Early History of the Housing and Development Boards and the Construction of Modern Singapore (1960-1971)
Benjamin Nathan ’15 – The Administrative Strategy of Thomas Stamford Raffles in Java 1811-1816