Alok Rai

Alok Rai attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and University College, London as a Commonwealth Fellow. His PhD George Orwell, Orwell and the Politics of Despair, was published in 1990. He has translated Munshi Premchand’s Nirmala, but he believes that his best work is the monograph Hindi Nationalism, published in 2001.

He was born into a family that gave him, “well before the age of consent”, a certain engagement with matters of language and culture, with literature. He received his early education in Allahabad which, he insists, gives him a kind of privileged vernacular access.

He has taught at the University of Allahabad, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, and University of Pennsylvania. He retired from the Department of English, University of Delhi in 2011.