About

Dr Nidhin Donald completed his doctoral degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi in Sociology between 2016 and 2021. Later, he worked as an Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (2022-23), Swiss Government Excellence Fellow at the University of Lucerne (2023-24), Moturi Postdoctoral Fellow at Krea University, India (2024-25) and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, Humboldt University of Berlin (2025-26).

His research dwells comfortably in a halfway home between sociology and history. Donald’s doctoral work discussed how caste-communities, families and individuals write and display their histories in digital and non-digital spaces, amidst rapid social and economic change. With a focus on finer socio-spatial scales (family, house and household), Donald has been exploring the everyday life of minority/majority religions, socio-legal interventions and changing social class formations. Since his time as the Swiss Government Fellow, he has been analysing the World Health Organisation Archives on the interconnection between health and human dwelling. More recently, as a Humboldt Fellow, Donald began reading the community archives of East Indian Catholics, Knanaya Christians and others along the Western Coast of the Indian subcontinent to understand their discourses on labour, region, religion, nation and family. Throughout his varied interests, Donald seeks to establish conversations between archival research and ethnographic fieldwork.

Donald has also been a freelance illustrator for over a decade with a significant body of published works.

Research

Nidhin Donald’s research publications revolve around questions of popular family historiography, social reproduction of identities, migration, digital cultural objects, law, caste, Christianity and Kerala. He draws methodological inputs from historical sociology, sociology of family & religion, critical discourse analysis and visual/digital ethnography. He places his work within a growing body of research that contributes to the socio-historical study of family and lineage-based associations, focusing on how familism shapes and is shaped by socio-economic and demographic shifts in local, regional and transnational spaces. His work also highlights the modern life of caste/s across religious contexts in South Asia.

After submitting his doctoral thesis, Donald’s research has taken two distinct yet intertwined directions— one, he has been analysing the conceptual journey of house and household as critical categories in postcolonial decennial censuses in India and public health archives. He aims to explore house/household/family as a conceptual triad in national and transnational discourses on policy and norm-making. Two, he has been tracing the postcolonial articulations of Christian communities through a combination of sociological and historical methods.

Publications 

Journal Articles / Book Chapters

• Singh, Asha & Nidhin Donald (2026). Caste as a Perilous Promise? Thinking with and Beyond the Bihar Caste Survey/Census. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 61, No. 23, pp. 65-72.
• Donald, Nidhin (2025). Looking Under the Religion–Family Nexus: Syrian Christian Articulations in India. Religions, Vol. 16, No. 10, 1295.
• Donald, Nidhin & Asha Singh (2025). Ambedkar on Indian Christianity: towards a critique, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1, pp. 1-17.
• Donald, Nidhin (2024). Mobilising Kinship as a Modern Network: Syrian Christian Family Associations. South Asia Research, Vol. 44, Issue No. 2, pp. 248-262
• Donald, Nidhin (2024). Displaying the ‘Family’ Online: Reflections on Syrian Christian Visual Life, in Anuja Agrawal (ed.), Family Studies, Oxford University Press, pp. 297-326.
• Donald, Nidhin and Asha Singh (2023). Beyond the Paternity of Caste: The Dalit Christians/Dalit Muslim Challenge to the Rule Book. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 58, Issue No. 9, pp. 24-28
• Donald, Nidhin (2022). Dissecting ‘Modern’ Syrian Christianity [Review Article]. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 57, Issue No. 39, pp. 28-33.
• Donald, Nidhin (2022). The ‘Brahmin’ in Syrian Christian Family Histories. Indian Church History Review, Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 63-81.
• Donald, Nidhin and Asha Singh (2022). Writing as a Non-Hindu Indian: J.E. Sanjana and the Caste Question. Nidan: International Journal for Indian Studies, Vol. 7, Issue No. 1, pp. 103-114.
• Donald, Nidhin (2022). Every Family its Own Historian? The Case of Syrian Christian Family Histories. Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 57, Issue No. 28, pp. 57-64.
• Donald, Nidhin (2021). Schooling the Past: Reflections on Syrian Christian Family Historiography. Kakatiya Journal of Historical Studies, Vol. XVI. No.1, pp. 42-55.
• Donald, Nidhin (2021). Is Endogamy Christian or Unchristian? Tracing the Knanaya Debate. Special Issue on Sociology of Law, Explorations (E-journal of Indian Sociological Society), Vol. 5 (2), October 2021, pp. 252-264
• Donald, Nidhin (2020). Nasrani Family Histories and Migration. In S. Rajan & S. M. (Eds.), Handbook of Internal Migration in India, New Delhi: Sage. pp. 290-302.
• Singh, Asha., & Nidhin Donald (2019). Asking questions of OBC as a category. Prabuddha: Journal of Social Equality, 3(1), pp. 32-49.
• Donald, Nidhin. (2018). Religion as ‘unsettled’: Notes from Census and Anti-Caste Mobilizations. Prabuddha: Journal of Social Equality 1, no. 1, pp. 68-77
• Donald, Nidhin. (2015). “Gazing from a Distance: Spatial Reading of a Law Commission Report.” Indian Feminisms, Law Reform and The Law Commission of India: Special Issue in Honour of Lotika Sarkar, R. Sen & S. Mandal Eds., Journal of Indian Law & Society 6, pp.91-109.

Forthcoming Journal Articles/Book Chapters 

• Donald, Nidhin (forthcoming). Who is your Ancestor? Making Sense of the ‘Brahmin’ in Syrian Christian Family Histories. In Sumit Turuk and Barbara Harriss-White (Eds.), The Elephant in the Room: An Anthology of Essays on Castes, Westland Books.
• Donald, Nidhin & Asha Singh (forthcoming). Negotiating the ‘thing’ called Religion: Stories from the Field. In Yagati Chinna Rao & Priyadarshini Vijaisri (Eds.), Marginality, Exclusion and Contestations, Bloomsbury.
• Donald, Nidhin & Asha Singh (forthcoming). The Everyday of Christian Endogamy in Kerala: The Case of the Knanaya Catholics, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Taylor and Francis.

Select Illustrations 

• Ek Gudiya Ya Chaar Kitaabein?, Pratham Books, Bangalore (with Asha Singh), 2026.
• B.R. Ambedkar: A Life in Books, Pratham Books, Bangalore (with Yogesh Maiterya), 2021.

Teaching Modules

Over the past five years, Nidhin Donald has designed and taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Sociology, Religious Studies, Social Anthropology and Public Policy at St. Xavier’s College Mumbai; Symbiosis School of Liberal Arts (SSLA), Pune; FLAME University, Pune; University of Lucerne, Switzerland and Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany.

These courses include: Christianity in Modern India: People, Places and Politics; Family in Social Analysis: Methods and Politics; Sociology of India: Themes and Perspectives; Introduction to Research Methodology;  Health Policy; Education Policy and Rural and Urban Development Policy. He is currently engaged in designing elective/required courses on historical sociology, human dwellings and advanced sociological theory.