Professor Manali Desai

Manali's recent work includes three projects: (1) Gendered Violence and Urban Transformation in India and South Africa (ESRC 2020-24) which examines gender and sexual violence in urban and peri-urban India and South Africa; (2) A comparative and historical analysis of how parties articulate their social bases of support; (3) A comparative study of colonial rule and long-term development in India funded by a grant from the Cambridge Humanities Research Grant.

The project used historical quantitative and qualitative data to examine state infrastructural power across India, and its effects on patterns of inequality, growth and basic goods provision. 

Her new project explores the persistence of caste in India (see Caste as Practice: Persistence and Transformations - CRASSH), in addition to exploring how caste compares with social formations that are described as ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ in other contexts, seeking in particular to de-centre dominant frameworks of theorizing ‘race’ in western contexts (see Thinking Us – Global Racisms Institute for Social Transformation). 

Research Groups and Affiliations

Lead Organiser, ‘Caste As Practice: Persistence and Transformation,’ CRASSH Research Network 2024-25 with PhD students Priyanka Kotamraju and Vishal Vasanthakumar and Dr Jusmeet Singh Sihra. 

Lead Organiser, Infrastructures of Gendered Violence, Department of Sociology, 2016- 2018 with networks in India, Pakistan and South Africa and affiliated faculty at The University of Oxford and University of Johannesburg. Research Assistants: Mahvish Ahmad and Katie Gaddini (Sociology, Cambridge) 

Gender Research Group

Culture and Politics Research Group

Grants and Projects

• Co-Investigator with Professor Monica Moreno Figueroa, (£58,000) ‘Thinking Us: Methodologies in the Study of Race and Racialisation,’ SHSS. 
• Desai, M. (PI) Gendered Violence and Urban Transformation in India and South Africa. ESRC Large Grant (2020-2023): £1.76m
• Desai, M. (PI) Comparative Study of Gendered Violence: India and South Africa. School of the Humanities and Social Sciences (2016-18): £67,845
• Desai, M. (PI) Colonial State-Building and Development Trajectories within India. Cambridge Humanities Research Grant (2016): £11,563
• Desai, M. (PI) Beyond Identity?: Markets and Logics of Democratization in Post-1991 India. Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (2010-2013): £78,500
• Desai, M. (PI) Ethnic Violence and State Formation in Western India. British Academy Research Grant (2006-2008): £6,750

Publications

Books

• Roy, Indrajit and Desai, Manali (eds). 2026 (forthcoming). Handbook of Indian Politics and Society. Cambridge University Press
• DeLeon, C., M. Desai and C. Tugal (eds.). 2015. Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. (ASA Political Sociology Section: Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship (Article or Book Chapter) Award  (Honorable Mention)
• Chatterjee, P., M. Desai and P. Roy (eds.). 2009. States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia.  New Delhi: Zubaan and Cambridge University Press.
• Desai, M. 2007. State Formation and Radical Democracy in India, 1860-1990. [Studies in Asia's Transformations Series]. London and New York: Routledge. 

Book Chapters

• Desai, Manali and Rashmi Singh. 2020. ‘Machine Politics and Clientelism,’ in Janoski, T. et al. (eds). Handbook of Political Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
• Desai, Manali. 2019. “Democratic Trajectories IV: Comment,” in Alf Gunvald Nielsen and Srila Roy, eds. Indian Democracy: Origins, Trajectories, Contestations. London: Pluto Press.
• Desai, M. 2017. ‘The Emergence of Governance Discourse in Liberalizing India,’ in eds. Sekhar, M., Parasuraman, P, and R. Kattumuri, Governance and the Governed: Multi-Country Perspectives on State, Society, and Development. Springer: Singapore.
• Desai, M. 2015. 'Weak Party Articulation and Development in India, 1991-2014,' in DeLeon, Cedric, M. Desai and C. Tugal (eds.) Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 
• Desai, M., 2015. “Political Articulation: The Structured Creativity of Parties,” in Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society, edited by Cedric de Leon, Manali Desai, and Cihan Tugal. Stanford: Stanford University Press. pp. 1-35 
• Desai, M. 2015. ‘Hegemony and Ambivalent Subjectivity: Caste and Generation in Western India,’ in Roy, S. and A. Nielsen (eds.) Rethinking Subaltern Studies. Oxford and New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pps. 1-19.
• Desai, M. 2009. 'A History of Violence: Gender, Power, and the Making of a Pogrom in Gujarat,' in eds. Chatterjee, P., Desai, M. and Roy, P. (2009) States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia, Zubaan Books and Cambridge University Press, India, pps: 293-313.

Journal Articles

• Desai, Manali and Kammila Naidoo. 2025 (forthcoming), ‘Negotiating Everyday Gender-Based Violence: Reflecting on Fieldwork in India and South Africa,’ International Sociology. 
• Desai, Manali. 2025. ‘Multiple Masculinities in ‘City of Men’', forthcoming, Urban Geography. 
• Philip, Shannon and Manali Desai. 2025. ‘Buying Safety: Neoliberalism, Gendered Violence and the Everyday State in South Africa', Signs, 50(3). 
• Desai, Manali. 2023. ‘Crisis, Conjunctures and Turning Points in Historical Sociology,’ Social Science History, 47(1): 1-9. 
• Desai, M. 2016. ‘Gendered Violence and the Body Politic in India', New Left Review, May/June.
• Desai, Manali and Indrajit Roy. 2016. ‘Development Discourse and Popular Articulations in Urban Gujarat,’ Critical Asian Studies, Vol. 48, no. 1. 
• Desai, M. 2012. "Parties and the Articulation of Neoliberalism: From 'the Emergency' to Reforms in India, 1975-1991," Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 23. 
• Desai, M. 2009. "Colonial Legacies, State Formation and Repertoires of Ethnic Violence: The Case of Western India, 1940-2002," Journal of Historical Sociology, 22(2):147-179. 
• DeLeon, C., Desai, M., and Cihan, T., 2009. "Political Articulation: Parties and the Constitution of Cleavages in the U.S. India and Turkey," Sociological Theory, 27(3):193-219. 
• Dylan, R. and Desai, M. 2007. "The Passive Revolutionary Route to the Modern World: Italy and India in Comparative Perspective," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49(4).
• Desai, M. 2005. "Indirect British Rule, State Formation and Welfare in Kerala, India, 1860-1960," Social Science History, Vol. 29:3, 2005. 
• Desai, M. 2002. "The Relative Autonomy of Party Practices: A Counterfactual Analysis of Left Party Ascendancy, Kerala, India, 1934- 1940," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 108 (2).

Other

• ‘No City for Women,’ 2023 (Documentary Film, Dir. Rangan Chakravarty)