William R. Pinch is a historian of South Asia, especially India. His work engages themes in historical representation, asceticism (in India and the West), and the nature and culture of politics. His book Peasants and Monks in British India (1996, University of California Press) examined the intersecting social, cultural, and intellectual histories of caste and asceticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on lineage claims and community histories. Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (2006, Cambridge University Press) contextualized the life and career of the eighteenth-century Śaiva warlord Anūpgirī Gosāīṃ (a.k.a. “Himmat Bahādur” and “Himmat Girī”) in the long history and culture of Indic warrior asceticism. Pinch also edited the festschrift, Speaking of Peasants: Essays on Agrarian History and Politics in Honor of Walter Hauser (New Delhi: Manohar, 2008), and co-edited (with Ethan Kleinberg) the theme issue History and Theory in a Global Frame (2015). He continues to serve as consulting editor for the journal History and Theory.
Pinch’s most recent work is From Mutiny to Revolt: Women and the Beginning of 1857 (due out in December 2025 from Cambridge), a micro-history of military life in mid-nineteenth-century north India, especially insofar as it illuminates the evolution of a nonviolent military mutiny into a full-blown armed revolt. His joint translation, with Dalpat Rajpurohit and the late Allison Busch, of a eighteenth-century Hindi poem celebrating the 1792 victory of Anūpgirī Gosāīṃ over the Rajput Arjun Siṃh of Bundelkhand is due out in the Murty Classical Library of India series in 2026. Currently Pinch is preparing to begin new research on revolutionary asceticism in “the land of the Buddha” (Bihar) in the decades leading up to Indian independence in 1947.
Pinch is Professor of History and Global South Asian Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, USA. For more information on Pinch’s research, click here.
For information on Pinch’s current teaching, click here.
An abbreviated CV is available here.