Faculty Profile: Juned Shaikh

This year, History Professor Juned Shaikh, was awarded the 2024-2025 THI Faculty Research Fellowship. This past summer, he was able to travel to India to visit archives and examine historical artifacts for work on his second book on the history of the Indian Left. We caught up with Professor Shaikh to hear about his travels and ongoing work on his book.
Hi Professor Shaikh! Thanks for chatting with us about your THI Faculty Research Fellowship, to start off could you please tell us a bit about yourself and your research interests?
I grew up in India in the 1980s and 90s; some of the political, economic, and social changes in the country in these times have shaped my research interests. An important feature of this time was the assertion of ethnic/religious identities in public spaces which sometimes took the form of ethnic violence. The context in which this was happening included the avowal of caste based politics, which could potentially undercut ethnic politics, and therefore the renewed assertion of religious difference at this time. The other factor was the decline of the left, the global left in particular. One of the reasons that an Indian Prime Minister in the early 1990s supported the rise of religious identities was the unraveling of the Soviet Union. According to him, this signaled the demise of secularism in global politics and in India. Therefore, two of my abiding research interests have been caste and left politics in India. My first book was on the role of caste and class in the making of Bombay. The next will be on left politics.
Such interesting research! Could you also talk more about the specific project you are focusing on for the THI Faculty Research Fellowship?
The THI fellowship will help deepen my research on left politics in India. Indians started identifying themselves as leftist – Marxist, Communists, Socialist – from the early twentieth century. Some of them had been exposed to left politics abroad, either when they were students in European or American universities, or had traveled there as sailors and their ships had docked at ports where there was strong leftist politics. Another group that was introduced to leftist politics were soldiers who had served in the British army during World War I. One such person was an intellectual I am studying, Gangadhar Adhikari. Adhikari was self-confessedly apolitical as an undergrad in India. He pursued a PhD in Chemistry in Germany in the early 1920s and it was there that he started identifying as a Marxist. He joined the communist party of Germany and eventually returned to India in 1928, after completing his PhD, and joined the Communist Party of India. He remained a member of the Communist Party until his death in 1981. During his life as a communist in India he witnessed and participated in seminal moments in South Asian history. My project revisits some of these moments and highlights Adhikari’s involvement in these.
Some of our readers might not be as familiar with twentieth century history and politics in India. Could you describe the significance of understanding these key moments in Indian history?
The first half of twentieth century India was colonial or British India. Colonialism, anti-colonialism, and postcolonialism in the second half of the century, loom large as categories in the understanding of India. The left was shaped by these too. For instance, its critique of British colonialism positioned it as an important player in the anti-colonial national movement. But this also embroiled them in a paradox: Should they align with other parties who were also anti-colonial or critique these parties because they represented elite, and in their words, bourgeois interests? The communists alternated between these positions in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. And in the postcolonial period, they continued to grapple with it.
Some of the older comrades had worked with Adhikari; they would point me to pamphlets or documents I should read to get an understanding of a particular topic.
The dominant anti-colonial party, the Indian National Congress, was handed power by the British when they left India. The communists critiqued the Congress for favoring Indian capitalists and for using the colonial legal apparatus to suppress the Communist Party. But at other moments, some communists, including Adhikari allied with the Congress party on issues such as the war against China in the early 1960s or in formulating a foreign policy in which the Soviet Union played an important role. These policies led to many disputes within the left and they splintered into groups and factions. I want to explore these moments and disputes closely.
An important aspect of the THI fellowship was that it allowed you to travel to India for your research. Can you talk about why it was so important for you to work on this project in India, and if possible, share some of the benefits of being at specific locations for your research that became even clearer once you were there?
Most archival sources for my research are in India. Many in fact are in the Communist Party of India headquarters in Delhi. I spent a lovely few weeks this past summer (2024) in the party library reading newspapers, pamphlets, party documents and interacting with comrades there.

Some of the older comrades had worked with Adhikari; they would point me to pamphlets or documents I should read to get an understanding of a particular topic. Many interactions were in informal settings – while having lunch in the canteen or drinking tea. The warmth and generosity of the librarian and officials made it an extremely productive few weeks. I can’t wait to go back next summer, even though summer in Delhi is very hot and humid.
This is a difficult question, but as you continue to craft your next book, what is one continuing part of the history that you hope sticks with future readers?
One of the things that I am fascinated by and I hope future readers also find interesting is the endeavor by communists, such as Adhikari, to understand their times and then change it via a revolution. In order to understand their times they turned to history; in their commitment to change their times they hoped to make history. Both these interlinked endeavors produced dialogs, debates, rancor, misunderstandings, and splits. I hope I can capture and convey the drama, commitment, joy, tragedy, resilience, blindspots, and hope of some of the actors in my writing.