Aditya Nigam is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. His main areas of interest are political philosophy and social theory.
His recent work has been concerned with the decolonization of social and political theory. He has earlier worked on ideological and discursive formations and their relationship to the emergence and constitution of political subjectivities. The engagement with discursive formations has led to the need for greater attentiveness to the actual thought-worlds and imaginations of social agents and the need to step outside theoretical frames provided by standard theory, derived primarily from Western experience.
In particular, Nigam is interested in theorizing the contemporary experience of politics, populism and democracy in the non-West - treating the non-West as the ground for 'doing theory', rather than a field for application or testing of standard frameworks derived from the Western experience.
A parallel and related part of Nigam's work has been concerned with interrogating the received 'philosophical history' of capital, once again from the vantage point of the experiences of India and the non-West.
Aditya Nigam has also been associated with a group of South Asian scholars from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and India, working around the idea of the 'post-national condition'.
He also works with the CSDS's Indian Languages Programme and is on the editorial board of its Hindi journal Pratiman. He comments regularly on contemporary political issues on the blog, kafila.online
He is the author of The Insurrection of Little Selves: The Crisis of Secular Nationalism in India (2006), Power and Contestation: India Since 1989, with Nivedita Menon (2007), After Utopia: Modernity and Socialism and the Postcolony (2010), and Desire Named Development (2011).
