Prachi Deshpande

Dr. Prachi Deshpande is 2020 laureate of the Infosys Prize in Humanities. Dr. Deshpande’s research focuses on social and cultural history of historiography, language, and regional identities, particularly of Western India. Prachi Deshpande is Associate Professor of History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Kolkata, India. Dr. Deshpande has published scholarly works in English and Marathi. Her first book Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960 (2007) examined the emergence of modern history-writing practices in the Marathi-speaking areas of western India, and the importance of historical memory in shaping an enduring Maharashtrian regional identity.

Prachi Deshpande’s second book, Scripts of Power: Writing, Language Practices, and Cultural History in Western India (2023), examines changing relationships between writing, script and language through a focus on the cursive Modi script, and underlines the importance of the material world of writing to the modern linguistic state. Dr. Deshpande's essays and book chapters include "The Marathi kaulnāmā: Property, Sovereignty and Documentation in a Persianate form," in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (2021); “The Writerly Self: Discourses of Literate Practice in Early Modern Western India,” in Indian Economic and Social History Review (2016); and “Scripting the Cultural History of Language: Modi in the Colonial Archive,” in Partha Chatterjee, Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Bodhisattva Kar, eds. New Cultural Histories of India (2014).