Professor Chatterjee is a historian of South Asia who works on law and cultural exchanges in the British and Mughal empires – with particular attention to religion and family. She has been the Director of the Exeter South Asia Centre and is currently Professor of Indian History and Culture in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Easter Studies at the University of Oxford.
Her first book, The Making of Indian Secularism (2011) was on the shaping of the minority religious community of Indian Christians, and their contribution, directly and indirectly, to the emergence of a culture of secular politics, governance, and sociability. In 2020, she published Negotiating Mughal Law: a Family of Landlords Across Three Indian Empires, a rare micro-history of a family of zamindars (landlords) and their negotiation of the laws of the Mughal empire. This book won the Peter Gonville Stein book award from the American Society of Legal History in 2021.