BACKGROUND
Nikhil Pandhi is a medical and sociocultural anthropologist from India. He researches how caste, racialization, gender, sexuality, and ableism become embodied, felt, entangled, and contested in everyday postcolonial life. His interdisciplinary scholarship brings anthropology into conversation with critical caste and race studies, Black-feminist and queer of color epistemologies, sensory and affect studies, critical disability, gender, and sexuality studies, decolonial methods, and the medical humanities. Across these fields, he traces how inherited structures and infrastructures of power animate and haunt corporeal and libidinal life. He is especially interested in how sensation, affect, desire, memory, and bodily vitality absorb and register the force of social difference - and how other ways of sensing, knowing, and feeling might open possibilities for repair and more just forms of collectivity.
His first book manuscript, Dying of Casteism, draws on long-term enthonographic fieldwork in northern India conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Working alongside Dalit and queer doctors, local health activists, lower-caste opioid drug users and their families, the book develops an ethnographically grounded and conceptually insurgent account of structural casteism as an often-obscured form of embodied inequality. In doing so, it traces casteism's somatosensory, psychosocial, and affective harms across the interwoven registers of health, medicine, sensation, and sexuality. Unsettling Brahmanical, biomedical, and heteronormative epistemologies, the book shows how casteism is lived and reproduced through the flesh - in pain and exhaustion, touch and proprioception, vulnerability and hypervigilance, illness and atrophy, and uneven possibilities of care and wellbeing. Drawing also on a year-long apprenticeship with the Dalit Writers Association (Dalit Lekhak Sangha) in Delhi, Dying of Casteism chronicles the fugitive epistemologies and poetics through which anti-caste endurance, refusal, and survival are cultivated.
Pandhi's broader and future research coalesces around three interconnected trajectories. The first traces the everyday intersections between sexuality, psychic life, and the social determinants of health. Ethnographically grounded in the experiences of queer and gender-variant communities in the Global South, it seeks to understand how the biopolitics of caste, race, queerness, intimacy, and care become braided into quotidian experiences of psychic distress and wellbeing, while shaping uneven life chances. The second seeks to decolonize the medical humanities by amplifying and archiving anti-caste, queer-feminist, and anti-ableist ecologies and praxes that reimagine debility, dignity, and vulnerability. Third, he creatively cross-pollinates South Asian Studies and Black Studies, critical caste and race studies, and Afro-Asian solidarities to forge radical intellectual adjacencies. In dialogue with queer scholarship that crosses geohistories (and indebted to Keguro Macharia, Gayatri Gopinath, and Jasbir Puar), his work asks how yearning, fantasy, and desire might become infrastructures of relation and repair. Such crossings also track how difference disorients, frays, and reconfigures normative bodies, histories, and cartographies, while remaining attuned to the horizon of "new and better pleasures" (in Jose Esteban Munoz's unforgettable words).
Pandhi is also an award-winning literary translator and the editor-translator of "Love in the Time of Caste," (Zubaan Books, 2026), a groundbreaking anthology of Hindi Dalit-feminist short stories he assembled during his ethnographic fieldwork in India with Dalit writers and creatives. The book has been widely reviewed and described as "a crucial intervention in the affective politics of caste." Across his scholarly and literary work, Pandhi is invested in making the boundaries between scholarship and storytelling more porous, while approaching sensory and fleshly experience as a consequential terrain of social action, critique, and care. He is also deeply committed to decolonizing anthropological methods, evidence, and theory.
Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Oklahoma, Pandhi was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College. He recieved his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University and an MPhil from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
