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Souvanik Mullick wins 2024 Sardar Patel Award
The award ceremony will take place at UCLA on Oct. 5, with support from the Friends of the Sardar Patel Association.
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Staff Reporter - Tue, 26, Aug 2025
- 16:37 EDT
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Souvanik Mullick / anthropology.princeton.edu/
Indian origin anthropologist Souvanik Mullick has been named the winner of the 2024 Sardar Patel Award for his dissertation on democracy in India.
His study, “Democracy in Motion: Livelihoods, Politics, and Small Transport Operations in Delhi, India,” was completed in 2023 at Yale University’s Department of Anthropology.
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The committee praised the dissertation for its ethnographic depth and contribution to the understanding of democracy in India. The work “draws on rigorous ethnographic research in Delhi with rickshaw drivers of various kinds to ask how democracy actually operates in what is frequently touted as the world’s largest democracy.”
Mullick’s research is based on two years of fieldwork with small transport operators in Delhi and archival work in India, the UK, and the US. The study examines how migrant, working-class operators such as auto-rickshaw drivers and cycle-rickshaw pullers engage with legal systems, political parties, and bureaucratic processes to shape urban governance.
The committee described the dissertation as a “work that will make important contributions to scholarship in anthropology, law, urban studies, and South Asian studies,” while offering insights into how democracy is lived on the ground.
The award ceremony will take place at UCLA on Oct. 5, with support from the Friends of the Sardar Patel Association. Mullick will present his work at 11:15 a.m., followed by a Q&A session and lunch.
Mullick is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and Humanities at Princeton University. He received his doctorate in socio-cultural anthropology from Yale in December 2023 and previously earned law degrees from the University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor, and the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata.
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