Devyani Gupta   St John’s College Cambridge CB2 1TP dg398@cam.ac.uk

Devyani Gupta is in her first year of PhD in history at St John’s College, Cambridge. She graduated with a BA (Hon) in history from St Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, where she also completed an MA in modern Indian history. In 2008-2009, she taught history at undergraduate level in the Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Delhi. In 2011, she graduated with an MPhil from the Department of History, University of Delhi. Her MPhil thesis was entitled ‘Postal Expansion in Nineteenth Century India: Issues of Military Supremacy, Political Control and Commercial Domination’.

For the doctoral degree at Cambridge, Devyani’s proposed area of research is an administrative and social history of the postal system in colonial north India, to be supervised by Professor Christopher Bayly. Her research seeks to study the growth and development of the Indian postal network, which was of primary importance to the establishment of the colonial empire and was, arguably, one of the most visible, invasive and cataclysmic mediums of colonial control. And yet, she argues, the postal system as an institution of governance and a means of socio-economic change seems to have escaped the attention of most historians. Devyani’s work attempts to contextualize postal developments against the background of geo-political, socio-economic, physiographical, scientific and ideological factors at work in the period. She will also attempt to investigate the nature of colonialism, as it emerged in modern India, typified by hierarchical bureaucratization creating horizontal spheres of separation, precluding the possibility of postal institutions functioning as a unified whole. This assumes additional significance, given the fact that the British state in India sought to deploy postal lines as networks of surveillance and control.

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