Draft:Pratinav Anil

Pratinav Anil
Born	Pratinav Anil (1995-03-17) March 17, 1995
Academic background
Alma mater	Sciences Po St John's College, Oxford
Thesis	A minority's agency: class, confession, and the quandaries of Muslim India, 1947-c. 1977 (2022)
Doctoral advisor	Rosalind O'Hanlon
Influences	Karl Marx
Academic work
Discipline	History
Sub-discipline	History of India
Institutions	University of Oxford

Pratinav Anil is a historian of India at the University of Oxford. He is the author of two monographs, India’s First Dictatorship, co-authored with Christophe Jaffrelot, and Another India, singly authored, both revisionist accounts of postcolonial Indian history published by Hurst & Co. He is a regular reviewer for The Guardian and The Times. His writings have also appeared in History Today and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Life

He apprenticed as a business consultant in Oxford and as a farmhand in the Val-d’Oise. As of 2024, he is a Lecturer in History at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.

Publications and reception

Books

India’s First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975-77

In 2020, Anil's India’s First Dictatorship, co-authored with Christophe Jaffrelot, was published by C. Hurst & Co. It argued that democracy fell apart so quickly in India in 1975 because its core values, including liberty, were poorly institutionalized in the Indian setting. Ajoy Bose praised the book in India Today "not just for [its] extensive research and intellectual sweep, but because of [its] contemporary relevance." The book was shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize and Karwaan Prize.

Another India: The Making of the World's Largest Muslim Minority, 1947–77

In 2023, Anil's second book was published by C. Hurst & Co. It is based on his PhD thesis at the University of Oxford. It weaves together biographical portraits of a wide range of Indian Muslims to argue that minority rights were neglected right from independence in India. "The Congress regime that ruled for three decades was often illiberal, intolerant and undemocratic," the author argues. The Financial Times chose the book as among its best books of the year.

Opinions

Anil was unimpressed by the defence of the British Empire mounted by Nigel Biggar, whom he accused of anachronism, 'a certain credulity,' and for 'miss[ing] the bigger picture' in his review for The Times. He has also been critical of the British Empire's critics, such as Sathnam Sanghera, calling his reckoning with empire 'superficial' and 'unencumbered by facts.' He opened the piece with a clerihew poking fun of Sanghera. In The Guardian, he attacked Charlotte Lydia Riley's history of the legacies of the British Empire for emphasising race, when it was instead class that mattered. 'The causal link [between race and empire], though, isn’t nearly as neat as Riley suggests. Arguably, she’s got it backwards,' he wrote. Anil praised Tomiwa Owolade in The Times for arguing that it's class, not race, that matters in Britain. Owolade, he wrote, 'prudently steers between the Scylla of racialising everything and the Charybdis of denying racism.'

Publications

• India's First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975-77. London: Hurst & Co, 2020. 508 pp. Published by HarperCollins in India and Oxford University Press in the United States.

• Another India: The Making of the World's Largest Muslim Minority, 1947–77. London: Hurst & Co, 2023. 438 pp. Published by Penguin Books in India and Oxford University Press in the United States.

• "Emergency Chronicles", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 32, no. 1, 2022, pp. 265-72.

• "Cries and Whispers: Gunnar Myrdal in India", The Caravan, November 2023.

External links

• Pratinav Anil University of Oxford
• Pratinav Anil at The Caravan
• Pratinav Anil at The Spectator

This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.

Categories:

• Indian historians
• Alumni of St John's College, Oxford
• Indian male non-fiction writers
• 1995 births