Upinder Singh

Last updated

Upinder Singh
Dean of Faculty Ashoka University
Personal details
Born (1959-06-22) 22 June 1959 (age 64)
SpouseVijay Tankha
Children2
Parents
Relatives Daman Singh (sister)
Education McGill University, Canada (PhD)
St. Stephen's College, Delhi
Occupation
Awards Infosys Prize

Upinder Singh (born 22 June 1959) is an Indian historian who is a professor of History and Dean of Faculty at Ashoka University. [1] She is the former head of the History Department at the University of Delhi. [2] [3] She is also the recipient of the inaugural Infosys Prize in the category of Social Sciences (History). [3]

Contents

Education and professional life

Singh is an alumna of St. Stephen's College, Delhi and received a PhD from McGill University in Canada. She has a Master of Arts in history and an M.Phil. in history, both from the University of Delhi. She has a Ph.D. from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, with a thesis titled Kings, Brahmanas, and Temples in Orissa: an epigraphic study (300-1147 CE). She is a Professor in the Department of History at Ashoka University. [3]

Personal life

Singh is the daughter of Dr. Manmohan Singh, the former prime minister of India, and history professor Gursharan Kaur. [4] She is married to Vijay Tankha, a professor of philosophy and has two sons. [5]

Honours

Singh was awarded the Netherlands Government Reciprocal Fellowship in 1985, to pursue research at the Instituut Kern, Leiden. She was awarded the Ancient India and Iran Trust/Wallace India Visiting Fellowship to pursue research in Cambridge and London in 1999. She was also a visiting fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Singh has received the prestigious Daniel Ingalls Fellowship at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University in 2005. [3]

She is the national coordinator for history at the Institute of Life Long Learning at the University of Delhi. [3]

She was visiting professor at the University of Leuven, Belgium, as the recipient of the Erasmus Mundus Fellowship, May–June 2010. [2]

Controversies

On 25 February 2008, right wing activists demonstrated in the Delhi University campus, in protest of an essay by A.K. Ramanujan, titled Three Hundred Ramayanas . The activists felt the essay was offensive, and alleged that Singh was responsible for its inclusion in a list of recommended readings for the BA programme in history. The University denied the allegation and stated that Singh was "… neither the editor nor compiler of the book on Cultural History of Ancient India." [4]

Publications

Books authored

Books edited

Papers

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bindusara</span> 2nd Maurya Emperor

Bindusara was the second Mauryan emperor of Magadha in Ancient India. The ancient Greco-Roman writers called him Amitrochates, a name likely derived from his Sanskrit title Amitraghāta.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Romila Thapar</span> Indian historian (born 1931)

Romila Thapar is an Indian historian. Her principal area of study is ancient India, a field in which she is pre-eminent. Thapar is a Professor of Ancient History, Emerita, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kosala</span> Former country in India

Kosala, sometimes referred as "Uttara Kosala" transl. "Northern Kosala") was one of the sixteen great realms of ancient India. It emerged as a small state during the Late Vedic period and became one of the earliest states to transition from a lineage-based society to a monarchy. By the 6th century BCE, it had consolidated into one of the four great powers of ancient northern India, along with Magadha, Vatsa, and Avanti.

Indraprastha is mentioned in ancient Indian literature as a city of the Kuru Kingdom. It was the capital of the kingdom led by the Pandavas mentioned in Mahabharata. Under the Pali form of its name, Indapatta, it is also mentioned in Buddhist texts as the capital of the Kuru mahajanapada. Modern historical research pin its location in the region of present-day New Delhi, particularly the Old Fort. The city is sometimes also known as Khandavaprastha or Khandava Forest, the name of a forest region on the banks of Yamuna river which had been cleared by Krishna and Arjuna to build the city.

A. K. Shiva Kumar, is a development economist, policy advisor, and evaluator, who has over the past 40 years, taught economics, undertaken evaluations, conducted research and policy analysis, worked closely with governments, international agencies, and civil society organisations to advocate for changes in public policy and legislation. He teaches various courses at Harvard University, Indian School of Business, BITS School of Management, Young India Fellowship, S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research and Ashoka University. He is a board member of the Global Partnership to End Violence against Children, co-chair of Know in Violence in Childhood, and a member of the leadership councils of both the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) and Global Women's Institute, The George Washington University, Washington DC. In addition to serving as a senior policy adviser UNICEF – India (1992-2017), he was a member of India's National Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India, constituted by the Chairperson Sonia Gandhi. The council was set up in June 2004 to oversee the implementation of India's National Common Minimum Programme.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pratap Bhanu Mehta</span> Indian academician (born 1967)

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is an Indian academician. He was the president of the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank and was the Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University from July 2017 to July 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Early Indian epigraphy</span> History of South Asian writing systems

The earliest undisputed deciphered epigraphy found in the Indian subcontinent are the Edicts of Ashoka of the 3rd century BCE, in the Brahmi script.

Tosali or Toshali was an ancient city in the present day Odisha state in eastern India. It was the capital of the eastern province of the Kalinga Kingdom. While some scholars tried to identify this ancient city with Dhauli, 7 km away from Bhubaneshwar, other scholars were inclined to identify this city with Shishupalgarh, 5 km away from Bhubaneshwar.

Kanganahalli, situated about 3 km from Sannati, is an important Buddhist site where an ancient Mahastupa was built. It is on the left bank of the Bhima river in Chitapur taluk, Kalaburagi district in Karnataka, India. Nalwar is the nearest Railway station about 19 km from Sannati. The Buddhist site about 2.5 km from Chandrala Parameshwari temple of Sannati.

Heinrich von Stietencron was a German Indologist. During his academic career, he was an emeritus professor and the chair of the Indology and Comparative Religion department at the University of Tübingen.

Sunil Khilnani is a professor of politics and history at Ashoka University, India. Previously, he was a professor of politics and the Director of the King's College London India Institute. He is a scholar of Indian history and politics best known as the author of The Idea of India (1997). He was the presenter of a BBC Radio 4 series entitled Incarnations: India in 50 Lives, which was later published as a book in 2016. He was a 2010 Berlin Prize Fellow, and he was also a recipient of the Indian government's 2005 Pravasi Bharatiya Samman award.

Padmavati was an wife of the third Mauryan Emperor, Ashoka and the mother of his son, the crown prince Kunala. She was also the grandmother of Emperor Samprati.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vidya Dehejia</span> Indian art historian and curator

Vidya Dehejia is a retired academic and the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor Emerita of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University. She has published 24 books and numerous academic papers on the art of South Asia, and has curated many exhibitions on the same theme.

Brahmadeya was tax free land gift either in form of single plot or whole villages donated to Brahmanas in the early medieval India. It was initially practiced by the ruling dynasties and was soon followed up by the chiefs, merchants, feudatories, etc. Brahmadeya was devised by the Brahmanical texts as the surest mean to achieve merit and destroy sin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Puranic chronology</span> Timeline of Hindu mythology based on the Puranas

The Puranic chronology is a timeline of Hindu mythology based on the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the Puranas. The central dates here are the Kurukshetra War and the Lanka War with the start of the start and end of the Kali Yuga and the other yugas and all the other events in Hindu mythology. The Puranic chronology is referred to by proponents of Indigenous Aryans to propose an earlier dating of the Vedic period, and the spread of Indo-European languages out of India, arguing that "the Indian civilization must be viewed as an unbroken tradition that goes back to the earliest period of the Sindhu-Sarasvati Valley traditions ."

The information about Mother of Ashoka The Great, the 3rd Mauryan emperor of ancient India, varies between different sources. Ashoka's own inscriptions and the main texts that provide information about his life do not name his mother. The Asokavadanamala names her Subhadrangi, while Vamsatthapakasini calls her Dharma. Different texts variously describe her as a Brahmin or a Kshatriya.

Chunar stone or Red-spotted sandstone is a kind of reddish or buff-colored, finely grained, hard sandstone quarried in the Chunar in the Mirzapur District of Uttar Pradesh, and widely used in the architecture of India.

Nayanjot Lahiri is a historian and archaeologist of ancient India and a professor of history at Ashoka University. She was previously on the faculty of the department of history at the University of Delhi.

Amita Baviskar is a sociologist and Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology & Anthropology at Ashoka University, India. Previously, she was Professor at the Sociology Unit, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India. She received the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research and, in 2010, was awarded the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences – Sociology in recognition of her analysis of social and environmental movements in modern India. Baviskar studies the cultural politics of environment and development in rural and urban India.

Gosahasra or go-sahasra-dana is a ritual donation described in the ancient texts of India. It is one of the sixteen great gifts (shodasha-mahadana), and is frequently mentioned in the ancient inscriptions.

References