Abraham won the award for 2021-22 but chose to defer his award until the 2022-23 academic year. Abraham is a DPhil researcher in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. He has a master’s degree from Royal Holloway, University of London.
His dissertation was shortlisted for the 2021 British Association of South Asian Studies' MA dissertation prize. Abraham’s DPhil project investigates transformations in the nature of Christian identity, politics, and community in the Punjab region of north India during the upheavals of the twentieth century. He asks how challenges of caste, economic crises, the violence of partition, the evolution of the modern nation-state, and war, have been negotiated by missionaries, religious thinkers, and everyday practitioners of Christian communities.
His project will evaluate this development as an interaction of Indian ‘untouchable’ and ‘high caste’ groups with missionary institutions within colonial and postcolonial structures. It will therefore be a study of the development of their particular subjectivity, and politics of community, consensus, and self-representation. In doing so this project injects a new perspective into a historiography characterised by a lack of vernacular sources, and dominance by western scholars.
