Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Center for Contemporary South Asia
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Bhawani Buswala

Visiting Fellow
Summer Fellow 2014

bhawani_buswala@brown.edu

Bhawani Buswala is an anthropologist with extensive fieldwork experience in North India. He
completed his PhD in Anthropology at Brown in 2016. From 2016-17, he was the Singh
Postdoctoral Associate in the South Asian Studies Council and a Lecturer in the Anthropology
Department at Yale University. His principal research interests include questions of social
inequality, caste, development, urbanization, urban poverty, discrimination, language, and the
state and citizenship. He explores these questions in Rajasthan and Delhi through ethnographic
data on informal work, spatial sociality, food politics, everyday lived experiences, informal
settlements, and intercommunity relations.

Before earning his PhD in the US, he was trained in critical research and methodologies at
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). He completed an MPhil in Sociology as well as an MA in
International Politics from JNU. He is also a qualified Chemical Engineer with a brief, but
critical, exposure to shop floor working conditions in two major fertilizer plants in North India.