Dr. Abhishek Kaicker

Biography

Abhishek Kaicker is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the history of Persianate South Asia, focusing on the Mughal Empire from around 1200 to 1900. His research interests include intellectual history, early modern global history, and the interplay of religion and politics in urban centers. Kaicker's recent book, 'King People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi' (Oxford University Press, 2020), examines how ordinary urbanites in Shahjahanabad, the Mughal capital, became assertive political subjects during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is currently engaged in several major research projects, including a study of the prehistory of the British conquest of Bengal from the perspective of the Mughal Empire and the transformation of Mughal modes of popular politics into modern forms of communalism in North India during colonial rule. Kaicker is also writing a biography of Anand Ram Mukhlis, an eighteenth-century courtier and essayist. He collaborates with fellow scholars in editing the 'Journal of South Asian Intellectual History', fostering new discussions on intellectual culture in premodern South Asia.

Research Interests