Srijan Sandip Mandal

I am a historian, keen on researching and teaching legal history, the philosophy of history, and public history.

I developed my research interests over the nine years that I studied at the University of Hyderabad, where I received my M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in History as well as two awards – the Andhra Bank Medal for “having secured the first rank in the M.A. History examination” and the Dr. (Mrs.) Sheela Raj Memorial Medal for the “best Ph.D. thesis” of the year in History. I pursued my interest in the philosophy of history through my M.Phil. dissertation, which drew on the historiography of Tipu Sultan to demonstrate a Kantian epistemology of history. In the same way, I pursued my interest in legal history through my Ph.D. thesis, which demonstrated that the restrictions on the right to freedom of speech and expression in the Constitution of India were deliberately designed to preserve colonial laws criminalising speech and expression.

I developed a keen interest in public history at the University of Hyderabad as well, but it was only at the Centre for Public History in the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru, where I was on the faculty for five-and-a-half years, that I learnt about the discipline of public history and began to research it. That is what led to my election to the Steering Committee of the International Federation for Public History, as its Secretary, for a four-year term in 2021.

I have presented my research on legal history to academic audiences in India (at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, the University of Hyderabad, and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai) and abroad (at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., the University of Aberdeen, the Université Paris Diderot, and the European Consortium of Political Research Joint Sessions of Workshops), and I am currently preparing a book proposal based on that research. And my research on public history, I have co-written about in an article for the journal Public History Review and in a chapter for the edited volume What is Public History Globally?

Beyond academic audiences, I have presented my research on legal history to lay audiences as well through articles in ThePrint and Seminar as well as through a conversational video bot named ‘Hukam Singh’ that I created as a Fellow of the Dara.network’s RadBots project. I have similarly presented my research on public history through my article in the quarterly Inter-Actions and through my heritage walks for Sahapedia at sites connected to Tipu Sultan in and around Bengaluru.