Poorva Rajaram (PhD, Jawaharlal Nehru University) is a Research Fellow at the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF), New Delhi. She specialises in economic history, gender history and the histories of capitalism, welfare and biopolitics. Her PhD thesis was titled “Normal Prospects of Life: Pensions and Insurance in Colonial India 1813-1947”. She received the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) doctoral fellowship. In 2019, she was Inlaks Visiting Scholar at the King’s India Institute, London. Rajaram used to work as a journalist at Tehelka magazine. Her writing has also appeared in publications like the Caravan, The Hindu and Yahoo Originals.
Areas of Research Interest
- Economic History
- History of Capitalism
- Financialisation
- Gender History
Ongoing Research Project
Ephemeral Finance: Nidhis in Early Twentieth Century Southern India
My broader interest is a theme of growing importance within the social sciences, the financialisation of daily life, which has been understood as the study of the how business and life cycles are connected. For this project, I explore the financialisation of the countryside, with distinct ideas of thrift, profligacy and the ‘correct’ forms of credit for the peasantry. This project uses official state archives and other non-official sources including newspapers and magazines to investigate the different business forms, including nidhis, involved in financing rural settings in the Madras province and the princely state of Mysore.
The nidhis in South India were both ‘indigenous’ and ‘modern’. The word nidhi was both translated as “provident society” and “loan society” by colonial administrators in the late nineteenth century while the more literal translation into English was simply ‘treasure’. Going beyond just nidhis, I hope to map the complex differentiated, overlapped and stratified market that consisted of friendly societies, provident societies, marriage, birth and death societies, small-scale life insurance, small loan societies, and dividing societies, agricultural banking, cooperative credit societies amongst others other financial forms.
Publications
Rajaram, Poorva. 2025. Review of the book Scripts of Power: Writing, Language Practices, and Cultural History in Western India by Prachi Deshpande, South Asian Studies 41(1): pp. 93-95. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2025.2458512.
Rajaram, Poorva. 2025. Review of the book. The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, Indian Journal of Gender Studies 32(2): pp. 227-231. https://doi.org/10.1177/09715215251323847.
Rajaram, Poorva. 2022. ‘Institutionalising Efficiency: Debating the Age of Retirement the Late Nineteenth Century Colonial India’, Journal of the Asiatic Society, 64(2): pp. 95-122.

