Indigo Mudbhary

Overview

Indigo Mudbhary (she/her) is a Ph.D. student broadly interested in writing environmental, political, and social histories of twentieth-century Nepal. She is particularly interested in nation and nationalism, state formation, neoliberalism, and international development. Methodologically, she is committed to engaging ethnography and oral history so as to amplify voices elided by the documentary archive. 
Her proposed dissertation project will investigate how designating a rural place as “remote” is a political, historically contingent choice with material consequences. By tracing the emergence and use of this discourse across colonial and postcolonial Nepal, she will explore how the state constructs remoteness to discipline subjects and landscapes that do not fit its parameters of modernity and citizenship. This potential dissertation project will contest how colonialist and later nationalist narratives categorize certain Nepalis and landscapes as “remote” so as to exclude them from history.
This project emerges out of a deep concern with how the field of modern South Asian history deems certain regions—such as Nepal—peripheral along colonial borders while simultaneously claiming decoloniality. Through her research, she hopes to trouble the dominant paradigms of the field by exploring Nepal’s divergence from historical patterns, such as its survival as an independent state.
Before coming to Cornell, she gained experience in public history through her time as an Exhibition Researcher at the Asian American and Pacific Islander History Museum in Providence, RI and a Research Assistant at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. Prospective students should feel free to contact her to discuss the Ph.D. in History at Cornell; she is happy to answer questions from potential applicants about the graduate program in History. 

Advisor: Durba Ghosh