PhD candidate Ridhima Sharma has been awarded a Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellowship for 2026-27 at the Jackman Humanities Institute, during which she will work on “The Ascetic and the Entrepreneur: Worker-Doppelgängers in New India.”
Sharma's dissertation is an anthropological study of political Hinduism in contemporary North India and its intersections—conceptual, material, and discursive—with work, service, and entrepreneurship. Her broad research interests relate to the emergent political, ethical, and aesthetic landscape in contemporary South Asia, with an emphasis on questions of work and labour, caste, and gender.
She is also interested in thinking through writerly forms and genres that help us articulate our collective present. Her research is supported by, among others, the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, Connaught Fellowship, Ontario Graduate Scholarship, Mary H. Beatty Scholarship, Department for the Study of Religion Award, and Social Justice Fellowship.
In the context of the traction of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva in contemporary India, the project asks: How might a conceptual orientation around "work" explain the durability of Hindu nationalist politics in contemporary India? Conversely, how might the lens of Hindutva help us think about emergent meanings, practices, and formations of "work" itself?
Through ethnographic fieldwork in and around the North Indian state of Haryana, the dissertation tracks different figurations of the "worker" of Hindutva. Thus, the project tells the story of contemporary Hindu nationalism by reframing it as the story of the doppelgänger figures of the ascetic and the entrepreneur located on a historically dynamic spectrum of "Hindu work."