Souvanik Mullick is an anthropologist and a lawyer. He studies state, law, cities, labor, and politics. Souvanik received his PhD Socio-cultural Anthropology from Yale University in December 2023 and law degrees from the University of Michigan Law School (LL.M, Grotius Fellow, 2013) and West Bengal University of Juridical Sciences (BA. LL.B (Hons), 2010). His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, USA (2019), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, New York (2019), and the Yale Macmillan Center (2018). He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled ‘Democracy in Motion: Livelihoods, Politics, and Small Transport Operators in Delhi, India.’
His broad research agenda has three overarching themes: First, he is interested in how social mobility and inequality combine to shape lived experiences of citizenship and socio-political subjectivities. Second, he uses law and society approaches to understand how conflicting imaginations of urban improvement inform the everyday functioning of democracy. Third, by tracing regional histories of street life and urban government formation, his work examines how cities take shape in processes of postcolonial nation-building. Situated within these more extensive research interests, the book manuscript builds on the dissertation. This study examines the everyday relationship between democratic institutions and the processes through which the working class negotiates its inclusion into the democratic ethos of a city in the global South. More specifically, the study focuses on the small-scale transport operators, the hackney carriage drivers, the cycle-rickshaw pullers, the auto-rickshaw drivers, and the new electric rickshaws, typically found in every South Asian city, as they make livelihood-related demands in legal, bureaucratic, and political forums across Delhi. Ultimately, his research analyses how this bottom-up working-class engagement keeps democracy churning in India and has broader implications for democracy studies and the global South. Drawing upon fieldwork and archives, the research contributes to anthropologies of democracy, law, cities, infrastructure, political action, and urban and legal history.
One of his recent articles titled ‘Small Transport Operators as Democratic Actors: Work, Politics, and Governance in Delhi’ was published in the Anthropology of Work Review in December 2023. In 2023-2024, Souvanik Mullick was a Fellow in the unique International Center for Advanced Studies, which is a consortium between the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India, and Max Weber Stiftüng, as well as the Universities of Würzburg, Erfürt, and Göttingen in Germany. This allowed him to spend a few more months in India doing follow-up research as he polished writing from his dissertation research. His primary affiliation for this position was at Gottingen University.
Mullick's fellowship is supported by the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India, the Princeton Institute for International Regional Studies, and the Department of Anthropology.
In Spring 2025, he will teach the Anthropology of Law (ANT 342).