Nikhil Pandhi

Nikhil Pandhi is a cultural and medical anthropologist, and an interdisciplinary scholar of health, caste, racialization, decolonization, gender and sexuality from India. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society and Fellows and a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. He completed his PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University and was also a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. Based on his fieldwork in India, Nikhil is currently completing a book-manuscript, Dying of Casteism, that is committed to developing an intersectional, embodied and ethnographic understanding of the somatosensory harms and everyday debilities of structural casteism, and emphasizes anti-colonial possibilities of repair and redress. His research cross-pollinates Black-feminist, Dalit, and Queer of Color ways of knowing/being/feeling by critically focussing on ethnographic stories, epistemologies, poetics and aesthetics from the Global South. He also relies on decolonial medical anthropology to theorize in novel ways the visceral and sensorial maneuvers of everyday life through which structural casteism and adjacent forms of racialization literally get under the skin of individual and collective existence, while influencing health outcomes and wellbeing. Nikhil is committed to decolonizing anthropological theory and methods, and South Asian studies, by creatively challenging disciplinary normativities and crossing sedimented geo/political histories and hierarchies. He is an award-winning anti-caste literary translator, and the editor-translator of a forthcoming anthology of Dalit-feminist short stories that he collected from his interlocutors during ethnographic fieldwork in India, entitled Love in the Time of Caste (Zubaan books, 2025).