2022
Lecture at the University of Heidelberg South Asia Institute Kolloquium
In May, Dr Sherman spoke at the University of Heidelberg South Asia Institute's Kolloquium on the theme 'The 1950s: Journeys into Postcolonial South Asia'. Her talk, entitled 'Nehru's India? Rethinking the First Prime Minister and the Administrative Machine in Independent India, 1947-1964', rethinks the idea that Nehru and other elites 'took the reins' of the administrative machine they had inherited from the Raj and ran the Indian state without alteration.
2021
Dr Sherman on India's relations with overseas Indians after Independence
In a new article, co-authored with Dr Raphaëlle Khan, she re-examines India’s relations with Indian communities in Ceylon and Burma between the 1940s and 1960s. Read the article in the Modern Asian Studies journal.
"Not Part of the Plan? Women, State Feminism and Indian Socialism in the Nehru Years"
In her latest article for South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Dr Sherman argues that in the Central Social Welfare Board, state feminism was concerned with the gradual transformation of women and a radical, if short-lived, makeover of the state. Read the article here
2019
Book review
Read Dr Sherman's book review in The Spectator (15 June) on Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India by K.S. Komireddi. After tearing through the Congress era, Komireddi levels his sights on Modi & the Bharatiya Janata Party.
2018
New article in Postocolonial Studies
Dr Sherman has released a new article in Postcolonial Studies, entitled “’A New Type of Revolution’: Socialist Thought in India, 1940s-1960s”. Although it is often said that early postcolonial India was socialist, scholars have tended to take this term for granted. This article investigates how Indians defined socialism in the two decades after independence. Understanding how Indians defined their version of socialism, Dr Sherman argues, will help scholars re-evaluate the role of the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in defining the goals India pursued after independence. It will also re-orient our understanding of the expectations and limitations of the Indian state in this crucial period in Indian history. LSE users can access the article for free.
New article on education in early postocolonial India
Dr Sherman published a new article in the journal History of Education, entitled “Education in Early Postcolonial India: Expansion, Experimentation and Planned Self-Help” (47:4). The article provides an overview of education policy in the first two decades after 1947 and finds that, contrary to what the constituion promised, Indian planning did not monopolise control over education. Rather, India’s socialism was a socialism of scarcity, which relied on self-help efforts by the people to build the institutions of the welfare state, entrenching existing inequalities.
2015
New book, Muslim Belonging in Secular India
Dr Taylor C. Sherman has a new book coming out in September, called Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad (Cambridge University Press). Dr Sherman's book surveys the experience of some of India's most prominent Muslim communities in the early postcolonial period. Muslims who remained in India after the Partition of 1947 faced distrust and discrimination, and were consequently compelled to seek new ways of defining their relationship with fellow citizens of India and its governments. Using the forcible integration of the princely state of Hyderabad in 1948 as a case study, Taylor C. Sherman reveals the fragile and contested nature of Muslim belonging in the decade that followed independence. In this context, she demonstrates how Muslim claims to citizenship in Hyderabad contributed to intense debates over the nature of democracy and secularism in independent India. Drawing on detailed new archival research, Dr Sherman provides a thorough and compelling examination of the early governmental policies and popular strategies that have helped to shape the history of Muslims in India since 1947. Read more about it here.