Abhishek Kaicker
Photo courtesy University of California, Berkeley

Associate Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow in History - Class of Spring 2025

Abhishek Kaicker is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a BA from Macalester College, an MA from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD in history from Columbia University. Kaicker is a historian of Persianate South Asia (c. 1200-1900), with expertise in the history of the Mughal Empire. His research focuses on intellectual history and the history of concepts; early modern global history; politics and the city; and the continuities between precolonial and postcolonial South Asia. Kaicker is the author of The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (Oxford, 2020), which offers the first comprehensive account of the relationship between the ruling authority and urban subjects in Mughal Delhi. Kaicker has held fellowships from the Society of Fellows at Harvard University and the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences at Columbia University.

Project Description

The Colors of Life in Late Mughal Delhi: A Biography of Anand Ram “Mukhlis”

At the Academy, Kaicker is at work on the first book-length biography of Anand Ran “Mukhlis” (1699-1751), the most important Hindu intellectual of the Mughal Empire. In The Colors of Life, Kaicker will trace the arc of Mukhlis’ life to explore the social and political dynamics of the imperial capital (modern-day Delhi) in the first half of the eighteenth century, and, in particular, how Mughal intellectuals understood and maintained their commitments to a life of the mind amid the collapse of a regime from which they derived their social status. While in Berlin, Kaicker intends to conduct research at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, which contains an important collection of Persian-language manuscripts from eighteenth-century India, particularly Delhi.

Academy Activities

Apr 29 2025
The Intellectual Bureaucrat: Imperial Collapse in Pre-Modern India History

Nina Maria Gorrissen Lecture in History

The Intellectual Bureaucrat: Imperial Collapse in Pre-Modern India

Thinking at the end of the Mughal Empire

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