Priyamvada Gopal

Priyamvada Gopal (born 1968) is an Indian-born academic, writer and public intellectual who is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Her primary teaching and research interests are in colonial and postcolonial studies, South Asian literature, critical race studies, and the politics and cultures of empire and globalisation.

The daughter of an Indian diplomat, she spent her childhood in India, Sri Lanka and Bhutan, and attended an international high school in Vienna, where her father served as a diplomat in the mid-1980s.

She is from a Brahmin family; she is a critic of the caste system.

Gopal received a BA in English from the University of Delhi in 1989 and an MA in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1991.

After finishing her studies in India, she moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies in English.

She received an MA in English from Purdue University in 1993.

She began her teaching career as a graduate instructor in the Department of English at Cornell University in 1995.

She continued her postgraduate work at Cornell University, earning an MA in English in 1996 and a PhD in colonial and postcolonial literature in 2000.

She joined Connecticut College in 1999 as an Assistant Professor of English leaving in 2000.

She moved to the University of Cambridge in 2001, where she is professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of English and a teaching fellow at Churchill College.

She has written three books engaging these subjects: Literary Radicalism in India (2005), The Indian English Novel (2009) and Insurgent Empire (2019). Her third book, Insurgent Empire, was shortlisted for the 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.

Gopal's work has appeared in several newspapers and online publications, and she has contributed occasionally to radio and television programmes in Britain and elsewhere.

Her remarks about race and empire have gained media attention and condemnation.

In 2021, she was named one of the world's top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine.

Gopal was born in Delhi, India.

From 2006 to 2010, she was Dean of Churchill College.

Gopal has written extensively about the impact of empire on contemporary culture in Britain and examined its broader social and cultural effects in South Asia and other former colonial societies.

According to Gopal, her motivation to speak about issues of empire and colonialism started with a disagreement with historian Niall Ferguson about the British Empire, on a 2006 edition of BBC Radio 4's Start the Week.

In her book Insurgent Empire, Gopal examines traditions of dissent on the question of empire and shows how rebellions and resistance in the colonies influenced British critics of empire in a process she calls "reverse tutelage".

She argues that ideas of freedom, justice, and common humanity had themselves taken shape in the struggle against imperialism.

Gopal has also written about the historical amnesia surrounding empire and called for a more honest account of how Britain came to be what it is today.

She argues that developing a demanding relationship to history is essential to understanding the formative and shaping nature of the imperial project on British life.

She supervises and teaches in the areas of literary criticism, modern tragedy, 19th-century and modern British literature, and postcolonial and related literatures.

Her primary interests are in colonial and postcolonial literatures, with related interests in British and American literatures, the novel, translation, gender and feminism, Marxism and critical theory, and the politics and cultures of empire and globalisation.

In October 2020, Churchill College set up a working group to critically examine Winston Churchill's views and actions relating to empire and race.

The working group held two events: "Churchill, Empire and Race: Opening the Conversation" and "The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill".

Gopal was a member of the Working Group and a speaker in both panel discussions.

In June 2021, college Master Athene Donald ended the Working Group's role after a dispute between the College Council and the working party.

In her statement, Donald stated that Gopal was frustrated over the Council's rejection of the Working Group's proposals for the third event.

She said that Gopal consequently wrote that the group might as well dissolve themselves.

Donald said that rightly or wrongly, she took that statement at face value and abruptly ended the role of the group.

Gopal rejected the rationale given for the group's dissolution and said that the college had instead disbanded the group.

She said that the disbanding was a way for the college to preempt the resignation of several members of the working group over the college pandering to the tabloid press and other groups.

In her Twitter feed, Gopal called attention to the role of the Daily Mail, Policy Exchange and the Churchill family in pressuring the college to discontinue the event, accusing university leaders of "taking fright" after the backlash.

Gopal tweeted: "Let me repeat: under pressure from groups like Policy Exchange and some members of the Churchill family, Churchill College has dissolved a group created to critically engage with Churchill's complicated legacies. Let that sink in."

In July 2021, the Working Group released a statement denying that they had disbanded themselves and accused the college of not following due process in ending its role.

The group also accused the College Council of undermining academic freedom and bringing the college into disrepute.

Gopal believes decolonisation is about a process of thinking about our intellectual, personal and political formation in a historical frame.

In an essay "On Decolonisation and the University", she wrote that decolonisation "commits to recognising the centrality of colonialism in shaping the globe as we experience it today; to assessing its consequences for communities and cultures; to interrogating and dismantling harmful mythologies and falsehoods on which the colonial project relied as well as those that underpin its afterlife today; and to repairing the great gaps in our knowledge and understanding that have emerged consequently (sic)."