Chitra Joshi

Short Biography

Chitra Joshi has been actively engaged in writing and researching on Indian labour history. Joshi's book, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and its Forgotten Histories (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003; London: Anthem, 2005) takes the present context of globalization and decline of large-scale industry as its entry point into the worlds of labour in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and examines how cultural pasts were actively reconstituted through worker practices. Other publications include an essay on ‘Deindustrialisation and the Crisis of Male Identities’, International Review of Social History, 2002 and ‘Notes on The Breadwinner Debate: Gender and Household Strategies in Working Class Families’, Studies in History, 2002. Currently Joshi is working on the history of roads and labour on the roads in nineteenth-century India. Chitra Joshi completed her post-graduate studies and her doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has been teaching history at Indraprastha College, University of Delhi for many years, before which she was a fellow at the Centre for Contemporary History, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.