We are absolutely delighted to announce the winner of the 2025 Sardar Patel Award: Dr. Manav Kapur, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Sunday, October 11, 2026

10:30 AM - 2:30 PM (Pacific Time)
UCLA Alumni Center

We are absolutely delighted to announce the winner of the 2025 Sardar Patel Award: Dr. Manav Kapur, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Manav Kapur’s dissertation, "Bounding Nations, Making Citizens: Partition, Property, and Belonging in Postcolonial South Asia," is a deeply researched legal history of how the Partition of British India into independent India and Pakistan in the 1940s produced new ways of regulating citizenship and political belonging. Focusing on the legal and bureaucratic regimes governing “evacuee property” – namely, property left behind by migrants – Kapur demonstrates that Partition was not simply a story of nationalist mobilization, mass migration, and violence, but also of the emergence of a distinctive form of statecraft across South Asia which sought to use laws of property ownership to define national populations and minority status and to draw boundaries around territory. Working across archival records from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Britain, the dissertation reveals striking points of convergence in how new nation-states came to link citizenship and property in the aftermath of empire. Particularly compelling is the project’s comparative scope, bringing the western and eastern frontiers of Partition into a single analytical frame and tracing the circulation of evacuee property law beyond South Asia, including into the Middle East. The result is a dissertation which makes a genuinely original contribution to a global history of partition and population transfers and presents a new genealogy of the distinctive problems of citizenship in postcolonial states.

Bio: Dr. Manav Kapur is a historian of law, migration, and citizenship of modern South Asia, presently teaching as an Assistant Professor in the Department at History at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Kapur received his PhD in History from Princeton University and has law degrees from the New York University School of Law (2012), and NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad (BA. LL.B., 2010). Prior to joining the University of Texas at Austin, he taught at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad and the Jindal Global Law School, Sonepat in India, and at the Department of History and Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages at Dartmouth College.

Please join us at the UCLA Alumni Center on October 11, 2026 to celebrate Dr. Kapur and his outstanding work. Please RSVP here so we know how much food to order.

Schedule
10:30 Welcome + Tea, Coffee & Snacks
11 Talk by Dr. Kapur, Winner of the 2025 Sardar Patel Award
12:20 Talk by Sitanshu Yashaschandra, poet, playwright, and translator, and recipient of both the Padma Shri and Sahitya Akademi Award (organized by the Friends of Sardar Patel Association)
1:30 Lunch

Hope to see you there!