Publications

EDITED VOLUME, 2025

This book presents a multidimensional approach to understanding the effects of COVID-19 on the lifeworld of the marginalized communities in India. The essays in the volume pursue two interrelated concerns: first, they examine the governance aspect, highlighting institutional failures, a lack of political will, and ideological warfare. Second, they firmly position the crisis – as a narrative tool – at the heart of marginality, thereby explaining the effects of COVID-19 on communities that continue to remain at the nation's margins. The volume presents varied voices and granular narratives of sufferings that structured the lives of the poorest and dispossessed in the country during a crisis. It dovetails the reshaping of material forces that were crucially impacted by the failure of governance with the social lifeworld of those containing what can be referred to as intergenerational trauma. This volume offers a robust account of the crisis by combining these two distinct but complementary dimensions of COVID-19 in India.

The volume will greatly interest scholars and researchers in governance, medical anthropology, public policy, politics, sociology, and South Asian studies.

Ranjan, Rahul. Governing the Crisis: Narratives of Covid-19 in India

Routledge Publication, London and New York, 2025.

EDITED VOLUME, 2022

This book demonstrates synergies and distils hard-earned lessons of human and forest rights struggles to inform the ongoing debates on environmental human rights. It highlights the ongoing struggles of the communities in postcolonial India that are confronted with the most brutal and unprecedented assault on their economic and sociocultural rights – often led by the political establishment.

The contributions in this edited volume present multiple narratives of these struggles, theoretical inquiries into a diversity of political imaginations, and the intertwined changes in the legal and biophysical landscapes. These contributions speak to some of the most important contemporary debates within the human rights community that stands in the crossroads with rights of Indigenous Peoples and other members of subaltern groups.

This volume will be of great value to scholars, students, and researchers interested in human rights politics, power, forest governance, and environmental movements in postcolonial India.

Scientific Publications

2024: Ranjan, R., “Sadhu activism: rights of rivers and facets of religious environmentalism in the Himalayas”, The International Journal of Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2024.2420244

2024: Ranjan, R., “Ecology of grief: Climatic events and disasters in the Himalaya”, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241264414

2024: Cinthya Sopaheluwakan and Rahul Ranjan., “Decolonizing Narratives in Communication: A Case Study of "The Tipping Point to Decolonise Sustainability", Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, University of Minnesota Press, https://doi.org/10.24926/ijps.v11i1.5954

2024: Ranjan, R., “A British Military Engineer, the Ganga and the Spectre of Control in Colonial Northern India (1839–1854)”, Environment and History, https://doi.org/10.3828/whp.eh.63830915903575

2023: Rahul Ranjan, et al., “Brief communication on the NW Himalayan towns; slipping towards potential disaster”, Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences

2022: ‘Land is Our Ancestor: Gender, Land Acquisition and the Nagri Movement in Jharkhand’ in Verma, V. and Linkenbach, Antje (Eds.) State, Law, and Adivasi Shifting Terrains of Exclusion (Sage Publications)

2021: Rahul Ranjan, Elizabeth Macpherson, Axel Borchgrevink, and Catalina Vallejo Piedrahíta, “Where ordinary laws fall short: ‘riverine rights’ and constitutionalism”, Griffith Law Review

2021: Ranjan, R. (editor), Kashwan, Prakash, and Kukreti, I., “The UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants, National Policies, and Forestland Rights of India’s Adivasis”, The International Journal of Human Rights, (Part of the special issue)

2021: Ranjan, R. (editor) and Kashwan, Prakash “Introduction to the Special Issue”, The International Journal of Human Rights

2020: Ranjan, R. “The Politics of Symbolism: Making of Birsa Munda’s Statue in Postcolonial Jharkhand.” Bandung: Journal of Global South (Brill Press)

2017: Ranjan, R. “Unravelling the Narratives of Adivasi Dispossession: A Case Study of Land Acquisition in Nagri Village, Jharkhand.” Development, Volume 60, Issue 3–4, pp 227–234 (Mac Milan Publication)

Reviews, Fiction and Popular Writings

Book Reviews

2024: 2024: Pacific Book Affairs, “Reordering Adivasi Worlds: Representation, Resistance, Memory”, by Sangeeta Dasgupta.

2019: Contemporary South Asia, “Adivasi and the state: subalternity and citizenship in India’s Bhil heartland” by Alf Gunvald Nilsen, (Routledge)

2018: Postcolonial Studies, “Mini-India: the politics of migration and subalternity in the Andaman Islands”, Philipp Zehmisch (Routledge)

Fiction (short story)

2021: “Living With the Flood”, Gulmohar Quarterly, Online Literary Magazines

Popular Forums and Blogs

2021: “Rivers as Narratives: A review of “Moving Upstream Ganga”, Doing Sociology: Building the sociological imagination

2021: Mourning on the Ghat: Bagmati, a short note, Doing Sociology: Building the sociological imagination

2021: Mourning a disaster: ecology of loss in Uttarakhand, Talking Humanities, curated by the School of Advanced Study, University of London

2019: All that glitters is not gold – international students as a media construct, Talking Humanities, curated by the School of Advanced Study, University of London

2018: Birsa Munda and his Ulgulaan (Rebellion), IAPS DIALOGUE: The Online Magazine of the Institute of Asia and Pacific Studies, University of Nottingham (UK)

2018: Birsa Munda and his struggle in Colonial India, Talking Humanities, curated by the School of Advanced Study, University of London

2017: Remembering Mahasweta Devi: A saga of writings on Subalterns, Talking Humanities, curated by the School of Advanced Study, University of London

2017: Student Dissent, Media Hype and the Space for the free Speech, Talking Humanities, curated by the School of Advanced Study, University of London