(Visiting Researcher, July 2025 – present)

Biography:

Girija Joshi received her doctorate in History from Leiden University in 2021. Her PhD thesis explored the sociopolitical and ecological transformation of southern Panjab—an area that today falls largely within the states of Haryana and eastern Punjab—between the mid-eighteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. Focusing on the region’s dominant agropastoral lineages, it traced how these communities reinvented themselves between the decline of Mughal and Sikh power through the establishment of colonial rule, and the changing bases of their influence in the countryside.

Having completed her doctorate, Girija moved to the Centre d’études sud-asiatiques et himalayennes (Paris) for a postdoctoral project centred around a corpus of Persianate histories that she had first used for her PhD. Her current research, funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, extends this investigation by focusing upon the household archives of landholding lineages across the Indus Plains and the Thar Desert. It studies these families and their underused records as an important part of the Persianate culture of northwestern South Asia, and one that endured into the early twentieth century.

Publications:

• Joshi, Girija. Resilient Communities: Household, State, and Ecology in Southern Panjab, c.1750–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025 (forthcoming).
• Joshi, Girija. ‘The View from Hansi: Caste and Social Flux in the Tashrīḥ al-Aqwām’. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (forthcoming).
• Joshi, Girija. Redefining ‘Legitimate’ Dependencies in a Panjabi Riyāsat: Local and Colonial Perspectives. Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series. Berlin: EB Verlag, 2022. https://doi.org/10.53179/9783868934298.
• Joshi, Girija. ‘Tussen Liefde en Dwang. Arbeid, Patronage en Status door de Bril van de ‘Tashrih al-Aqvam’’. In Slavernij Herbezien. Visuele Bronnen over Slavernij in de Indonesische Archipel en de Indische Oceaan., edited by Matthias van Rossum, Nancy Jouwe, Wim Manuhutu, and Merve Tosum, 49–55. Edam: LM Publishers, 2021.
• Joshi, Girija. ‘The Politics of Lineage: Caste, Kinship and Land Control in an Agrarian Frontier’. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 21 (2019). https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.5638.