Upinder Singh is an Indian historian who is Professor and Dean of the Faculty of History at Ashoka University in Sonipat, Haryana. Earlier she was working as the head of the history department at Delhi University. She is the daughter of former Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh. She is also a recipient of the inaugural Infosys Prize in the Social Sciences (History) category.
Contents
Wiki/Biography
Upinder Singh was born on Monday, 22 June 1959 (age 63 years; as of 2022) in Amritsar, Punjab, India. In 1966, Manmohan Singh and his family moved to New York, where he worked for UNCTAD.
Manmohan Singh with his wife Gursharan and daughter Upinder Singh
However, Manmohan and his wife Gursharan wanted their daughters to grow up in India with Indian values. Therefore, they returned to India and lived in Delhi when Upinder was ten years old. Upinder grew up with her two sisters, Daman and Amrit, and all three of them were voracious readers, a trait instilled in them by their father. In an interview, Daman recalled his childhood memories and said,
Our most exciting outing was when our father took us to a bookstore. Our birthday gifts were always books. There was a time when we lived at walking distance from the Delhi Gymkhana Club, which has an excellent library. “I remember fighting with my sisters for a library card, borrowing two books, rushing home and racing to finish them so I could borrow the next two.”
Childhood picture of Upinder Singh, Daman Singh and Amrit Singh
He did BA (Hons) in History from St. Stephen’s College and MA (1981) and MPhil (1984) in History from Delhi University. In 1991, he completed his PhD at McGill University, Montreal, Canada with a thesis titled “Kings, Brahmins and Temples in Orissa: An Epigraphic Study (300-1147 CE)”. Later, he received fellowships to conduct research at Leiden, Cambridge, Harvard, and Leuven.
Physical Appearance
Height (Approx): 5′ 4″
Hair Color: Salt and Pepper
Eye colour: black
Family
Upinder Singh belongs to a Kohli Sikh family.
parents and siblings
His father, Manmohan Singh, is an Indian politician from the Congress Party, who served as the 13th Prime Minister of India. His mother’s name is Gursharan Kaur. Upinder is the eldest among her sisters. His sister Amrit Singh is an American human rights lawyer. His sister Daman Singh is a writer and novelist.
Daman Singh with his parents, Manmohan Singh and Gursharan Kaur
Manmohan Singh with his daughter Upinder Singh (in red circle) and wife Gursharan Kaur
Daman Singh’s younger sister, Amrit Singh
husband and children
She is married to fellow academic Vijay Tankha, who is a professor of philosophy. They have two sons, Madhav Tankha and Raghav Tankha.
Upinder with her husband Vijay and son Madhav
Upinder Singh with his son Madhav Tankha
livelihood
From 1981 to 2004, Upinder Singh taught at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. In 1985, Singh received a Netherlands Government Reciprocity Fellowship to conduct research at the Institut Kern, Leiden. He has various literary works in his kitty. Upinder Singh’s writings draw on various aspects of ancient Indian social, economic and religious history, the interrelationships between political thought and practice, and Indian archeology (the modern history of ancient sites and monuments, and cultural relations between India and Southeast Asia). His research papers have been published in various Indian and international journals. In 1994, Upinder Singh first made his mark in the field of historical scholarship when he published Kings, Brahmins and Temples in Orissa: An Epigraphic Study.
In 1999, he was awarded the Ancient India and Iran Trust/Wallace India Visiting Fellowship to conduct research in Cambridge and London. During this period, she was also a visiting fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. In 2004, he began teaching in the Department of History at the University of Delhi, where he worked until 2018. He has served as the National Coordinator for History at the Institute of Life Long Learning at the University of Delhi.
Upinder Singh, head of the history department at Delhi University, delivering the Paduru Gururaj Bhatt Memorial Lecture in Udupi.
In 2004, he published The Discovery of Ancient India: Early Archaeologists and the Beginnings of Archaeology. Singh has also received the prestigious Daniel Ingalls Fellowship at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University (2005). Singh’s book A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the Twelfth Century (2008) describes original sources such as ancient texts, artefacts, inscriptions and coins. Between May 2010 and June 2010, she was a visiting professor at the University of Leuven, Belgium, as a recipient of an Erasmus Mundus Fellowship. He made a pioneering contribution to ancient urban history through the book Delhi: Ancient History (1999). With his colleague Professor Nayanjot Lahiri of Delhi University, Singh wrote the book Ancient India: New Research. His work highlights the complexities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archeology and ancient Indian history.
Upinder Singh and Nayanjot Lahiri also co-wrote Buddhism in Asia: Revival and Reinvention (2018). In 2018, he was appointed as Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty at Ashoka University in Sonipat, Haryana. Other research papers he has written include Political Violence in Ancient India (2017), The Idea of Ancient India: Essays on Religion, Politics and Archeology (2016), and Rethinking Early Medieval India (2011). He has co-edited Asian Encounters: Exploring Connected Histories (2014). He has also served as a member of the Board of Management at the Delhi Institute of Heritage Research and Management, a member of the Editorial Board of South Asian Studies, an Adjunct Professor at Mangalore University and an external member of the Departmental Research Committee, Department of Heritage Research, India. Department of History, Presidency College.
Controversy
ABVP workers attacked
In 2008, activists associated with the right-wing student group ABVP attacked the history department of Delhi University, claiming that Singh had edited a book in which an essay by AK Ramanujan cast doubt on the existence of Rama. Singh was taken to security by SPG. The university denied the allegation, saying that Singh was “…neither the editor nor the compiler of a book on the cultural history of ancient India.”
Facts/General Knowledge
- His students call him U Singh. Her family lovingly calls her Kiki.
- In 2009, he was awarded the Infosys Prize in Social Sciences – History in recognition of his contribution as an outstanding historian of ancient and early medieval Indian history.
- Manmohan Singh’s three daughters married outside Sikhism. An excerpt from Daman Singh’s book Strictly Personal: Manmohan and Gursharan (2014) revealed that Upinder’s marriage to Vijay Tankha deeply hurt Manmohan and Gursharan. In fact it took a long time for Gursharan to accept Vijay and eat at the same table with him. Eventually, they began to like him and accepted him.
- An excerpt from Strictly Personal: Manmohan and Gursharan (2014) also states that Manmohan Singh’s family home in Ashok Vihar, Delhi was attacked by a mob during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. At the time, Manmohan Singh was the Reserve Governor of the Bank of India and had come to Delhi to pay tribute to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984 at the Golden Temple in Amritsar for authorizing Operation Blue Star. Was given. Upinder Singh and her husband Vijay Tankha were living in the family home at that time. When a mob arrived to burn his family home, Vijay Tankha convinced them that the house was his. Since he was a Hindu, the mob spared the house. Eventually, the family sold the house in 1986 because many houses in the area still bore scars from the riots.
- At first, Upinder applied for economics out of respect for her father, but later, she gave it up because she was very bad at mathematics. Manmohan Singh was not particularly happy with his decision. Daman revealed in his book that Manmohan had a low opinion of social science subjects other than economics. Manmohan’s sometimes careless comments regarding the study of history hurt Upinder. So Daman took up mathematics to please his father. However, when Daman moved to Irma, her father became angry again.
Categories: Biography
Source: vcmp.edu.vn