Mr Tom Wilkinson

Profile

I am a historian of colonial and post-colonial India and my research focuses on the history of Indian youth. For the past four years I have been studying for a PhD in International History at the London School of Economics. My doctoral research offers a new national and transnational history of Indian youth by examining the ways the Government of India mobilised this social body in the decades following independence.

I am currently working on turning my doctoral thesis, “Serving Independent India: Youth and the Nation, circa 1940-1970”, into a monograph. The enormity of this demographic group, the tremendous future role assigned to them, and their supposed state of indiscipline meant that the Indian youth became the object of renewed political and cultural interest in the decades following independence. My thesis traces the origins, growth, and consequences of youth mobilisations in early-post colonial India and how the shifting notion of “youth” had a profound effect on the building of the nation state at large.

Research

Publications

https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/6488

Expertise