I just submitted my D.Phil dissertation at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. My work is situated at the intersection of the history of political thought and feminist political theory, focusing on the intellectual history of anti-caste feminist movements in India. Previously, I completed an M.Phil in Political Theory at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. Before that, I received an M.A. in Politics with a Specialisation in International Relations from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a B.A. Honours in Political Science, from the University of Delhi.

My doctoral thesis, Reclaiming Resistance: Perspectives on the History of Dalit and Bahujan Women’s Political Thought, supervised by Prof. Amia Srinivasan and Prof. Sophie Smith, develops the first detailed intellectual history of the lower-caste feminist movement in India. I recover four significant yet historically forgotten moments of political articulation and organizational momentum by Dalit and Bahujan women between 1942 and 1995: the organization of the All-India Depressed Classes Women’s Conference in 1942 that shaped Ambedkar’s views in the Hindu Code Bill; the publication of Dalit Women’s Special Issue of Marathi magazine Asmitadarsh in 1981 that chronicled their views on intersectionality, household work and personal solutionism; the publication of Dalit women’s biographies and memoirs that led to a resurgence of ‘Ambedkar and women’ as a category of scholarly analysis in the 1990s; and the undocumented history of Dalit women’s international activism between 1982 to 1995 that foregrounds the relationship of race and caste, via sexuality. Each of these moments of activist, historiographical, literary, and organisational interventions by Dalit women, illuminates overlooked contexts that are relevant to feminist theorizing – intersectional oppression, solidarity, violence, sexuality and much more – decentering upper-caste feminist thought and Western feminist philosophy.

I am also interested in the politics of emotions. In my MPhil thesis which was supervised by Professor Elizabeth Frazer, I explored a political understanding of loneliness. I analysed how loneliness has been studied historically in political theory, particularly by contrasting and comparing canonical works in classical political theory and existentialist tradition. My thesis interrogated the relationship between loneliness and politics at three levels – the macro-logical level in the enumeration of social contract, at the structural level in the effects of systemic oppression and at the affective level which unites individuals to the psychic to the social to the political.

I have teaching experience in theory of politics, feminist theory, political philosophy and social change and political protests.

You can contact me via email: simple.rajrah@politics.ox.ac.uk