Salmoli Choudhuri

Salmoli Choudhuri is an intellectual historian of legal and political concepts that have played a foundational role in shaping modern and contemporary India and informing global thought. Salmoli completed her PhD in 2023 at the University of Cambridge on freedom and liberalism in the thought of Rabindranath Tagore, modern India's foremost poet and chief cultural icon. Previously, she pursued an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at Cambridge and read for the BCL at Oxford. In another life, Salmoli practiced law with one of India's leading law firms after graduating with twelve gold medals from the National Law University, Delhi. Following the completion of her doctoral studies, she joined National Law School of India University, Bangalore, as an Assistant Professor, where she taught subjects ranging from administrative law and jurisprudence to global ideas of freedom. Currently on leave, she was most recently an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the department of law, Humboldt University, where she worked on a monograph on Tagore and freedom. As a Koch Junior Fellow, alongside completing her book, she will begin a new project on the history of the state in Indian political thought and its conceptualisation in law and religion through juristic and sacral ideas from the interwar period to the mid-twentieth century. Since India was under foreign rule, the state was rarely an object of serious attention in anticolonial thought, which remained preoccupied with questions of nationalism and self-determination; by adopting a new focus, her project seeks to recover a distinct line of thinking about the state in Hindu and Buddhist thought during the late colonial period.