Dr. Sanal Mohan Padikaparampil

Sanal Mohan Padikaparampil is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences of Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, India. He was a Visiting Faculty Associate at the Centre for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania, USA in 2011.

In 2008, he was a Graduate School Postdoctoral Fellow in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of History and ICIS/RDI Research Fellow, Emory University, Atlanta, the USA. He was formerly a Fellow in History at Centre for the Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, Kolkata; Charles Wallace India Fellow in History, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He also worked as Honorary Research Associate, Social Anthropology Programme of Massey University, New Zealand.

His thesis, “Imagining Equality: Modernity and Social Transformation of Lower Castes in Colonial Kerala,” analyses Protestant Christianity, colonial modernity and social identities of Dalits in nineteenth and twentieth-century Kerala. His analysis of Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha, one of the religious and social movements of Dalits in the early twentieth century shows the social dynamics of Protestant Christianity in the South Western coast of India. He has also published research articles on the discourses and practices of this particular movement. His methodology is a combination of historical and ethnographical research. His current areas of research interest include colonial modernity, social movements and questions of identity, Dalit Movements and Christianity in India.

Sanal Mohan has been awarded a two-year research grant (September 2012-August 2014) by the Social Science Research Council, New York for the research proposal “From the Lord’s Prayer to Invoking Slavery through Prayers: Religious Practices and Dalits in Kerala, India.” At the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity he will work on a monograph on the above theme and interact with the academic community at the Institute.