Janaki Bakhle is an Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D (2001) in history, studying under, among others, Ayesha Jalal and Partha Chatterjee. A native of Mumbai, India, she earned her B.A. from Elphinstone College, Bombay University.
Bakhle specializes in Indian history and culture. In 2005, she published Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition. The book was credited with pioneering the study of the impact of colonization on Indian classical music, " an aspect of artistic life not hitherto thought to be 'touched' by colonialism." The Hindu called Two Men and Music "a pioneering study of modern North Indian musical history and a thought-provoking comment on nationalism and its cultural manifestations."
Bakhle is a minor figure in the Zionist political controversy at Columbia University. Both she and her husband signed the petition demanding that the University divest from Israel. Her appointment to a committee investigating allegations of anti-Israel bias on the faculty came under public criticism because of her close ties to both the administration (she is married to a vice-president of the university) and to the professors under investigation.
Bakhle lives in New York City with her husband Nicholas Dirks, Vice-President for Arts & Sciences at Columbia. The two met in 1994 when Dirks was giving a guest lecture at the University of Minnesota; Bakhle was working as an editor at the University of Minnesota Press.
Her current project is "Colonial Surveillance and the Educated Indian", supported by an NEH grant.
Publications
* Bakhle, Janaki. Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition, Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2005. xvi, 338 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780195166101 (hardcover). ISBN 9780195166118 (paperback).