Vijaya Ramaswamy is Professor and Chairperson, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is an alumni of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, California, in 1988–1989. She was a teacher-fellow on an Indo-Canadian Fellowship at York University, Ontario, Canada, in 1998. She was also a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study between 1992 and 1995. She was also a Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti House, New Delhi from 2012 to 2014.
Vijaya Ramaswamy is the author of 10 books amongst which the best known are: Textiles and Weavers in Medieval South India (1985, 2nd ed. 2006), Divinity and Deviance: Women in Virasaivism (1996); Walking Naked: Women, Society, Spirituality in South India (1997, 2007), Historical Dictionary of the Tamils (2007), Song of the Loom (2013) and Migrations in Medieval and Early Colonial India (2016). Vijaya has been the President of the Medieval India Section of the 63rd Indian History Congress Session at Mysore, 2003. She also won the ‘Professor Hiralal Gupta Research Award’ for the Best Book by a Woman Historian for the years 1996–2001, Indian History Congress, 60th Session, Bhopal, 2001.
Shamsul Islam is a left activist, author, and theatre person based in Delhi. His notable books include Know the RSS (2000), Golwalkar’s We, or Our Nationhood Defined (2006), and Muslims Against P
Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Bengaluru. She occasionally works on contemporary art projects. Her research interests are in the areas of sociolinguistics, land/landscape and food politics.
