Avrati Bhatnagar is a historian of South Asia and the British Empire. Her interdisciplinary research combines the study of image-based and textual archives to challenge existing scholarly understandings of colonial and postcolonial political cultures.

Her research offers a gender history of colonial Bombay in the era of anti-colonial nationalism. Her book in progress traces how middle-class women’s everyday urban practices drove nationalist politics during the Civil Disobedience Movement in late colonial India, even as the freedoms they claimed frequently exceeded and contradicted the nationalist agenda itself. Central to this argument is the class boundary-drawing through which these women staked claims to a new urban public life, with consequences extending well beyond the colonial period.

Bhatnagar draws on image-based and textual archives to bring new methodological approaches to modern South Asian history. Her publications include the co-edited volume Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay, 1930–31 (Mapin/Alkazi 2025) and work in History of Photography. Her co-curated exhibition Disobedient Subjects: Bombay, 1930–31 has been shown at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) in Mumbai and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and has received coverage in the BBC, Frontline, and The Times of India, among other outlets.