Dr. Laurence Gautier – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr. Laurence Gautier

CSH Delhi
History

Early Career Fellow
FRIAS Fellowship Programmes
September 2025 – July 2026

Website

ORCID ID

E-Mail: laurence.gautier123@gmail.com

Last Update: 01.10.2025

Curriculum Vitae

Laurence Gautier is a historian of contemporary South Asia. She earned her PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her research explores what it means to be a minority citizen in a postcolonial secular nation-state. Gautier focuses on Indian Muslims, who form the largest Muslim minority in the world in a famously diverse society. Her first monograph, Between Nation and ‘Community’. Muslim Universities and Indian Politics after Partition (Cambridge University Press, 2024), examines the debates on Muslims’ location in post-partition India through the lens of two prominent Muslim universities, Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia. It shows that these educational institutions played a pivotal role in the wider discussions on national integration, secularism, minority rights, Muslim backwardness and women’s status among Muslims. Gautier also co-edited Historicizing Sayyid-ness: Social Status and Muslim Identity in South Asia (JRAS, 2020) with Julien Levesque. This special issue examines social dynamics and hierarchies of status among South Asian Muslims through the notion of “Sayyid” (descendants of the Prophet and of his Companions). Before joining FRIAS, Gautier was Assistant and then Associate Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University, near Delhi. She also held a four-year position as Researcher in “Documenting Democracy: History, Politics and Citizenship”, at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH, New Delhi).

Selected Publications

Gautier, Laurence. 2024. Between Nation and ‘Community’: Muslim Universities and Indian Politics after Partition. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press, Online. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009358507
Gautier Laurence and Levesque Julien (ed.) .2020. Special Issue on “Historicising Sayyid-ness in South Asia”. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 30 March. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-royal-asiatic-society/issue/DFF7C483015E6EE0DB9FD52C1B69DE9A
Gautier Laurence. 2020. “A Laboratory for a Composite India? Jamia Millia Islamia around the time of partition”. Modern Asian Studies, 54, 1, 199-249. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X18000161
Gautier Laurence. 2019. “Crisis of the ‘Nehruvian Consensus’ or Pluralisation of Indian politics? Aligarh Muslim University and the Demand for Minority Status”. SAMAJ, 22. https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.6493
Gautier Laurence. “Approches postcoloniales et décoloniales”, in Marlène Bouvet, Florent Chossière, Marine Duc et Estelle Fisson (dir.), Catégoriser. Lexique des constructions sociales de la différence (Lyon : ENS Editions, 2024), 117-135.

FRIAS Project

Understanding secularism through state-minority relations. Muslim intermediaries in post-colonial India (1947-2004).

This project probes into state-minority relations in postcolonial India. It focuses, firstly, on Muslim “intermediaries” – especially Muslim parliamentarians, religious organizations and state institutions for Muslims – who acted either as delegates for state authorities vis-à-vis the Muslim minority, as patrons, or as spokepersons for their co-religionists. The project examines the role that these actors played in the management of religious co-existence. It draws attention, secondly, to the grievances and demands of “ordinary citizens” who sought, through these intermediaries, to reach out to the state. This project thus combines a social history of India’s secular state with a history “from below” of its minority citizens. Its objective is to show both how secularism functions and what it means “from a minority perspective”, in the country that claims to be the “largest democracy in the world”.