Rohan Chopra

India

MSc Modern South Asian Studies, 2023
St Edmund Hall, Julius Baer Scholarship
Funding: Oxford-Weidenfeld and Hoffmann

Rohan graduated summa cum laude in Politics and History from Ashoka University, India. As a recipient of the UN Millennium Fellowship in 2021, he founded Nivritti Education to ‘decolonise’ school education in India, where he combined the latest pedagogical interventions with academic insights to understand the production of ‘knowledge’ in formerly colonised countries. His work as a student journalist, editor and translator with the People’s Archive of Rural India, the world’s largest living archive, made apparent the role of bottom-up, informal educational networks in disseminating knowledge. Working in the context of religious nationalism, these experiences have convinced him of the need to employ indigenous knowledge to produce an accessible discourse that can counter exclusionary communal politics across South Asia at a grassroots level. Through his research, Rohan is excited to explore historical and contemporary alternatives to the politics of exclusion and with the Scholars’ support, find tangible ways to implement this.