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.
Rafia Zakaria is a columnist for Dawn (Pakistan) and the Boston Review’s ‘Reading Other Women’ Series. She is the author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan (Bea
Hoshang Merchant (b. 1947) has authored twenty-nine books of poetry, literary commentary, translations, memoirs, and anthologies including Yaraana: Gay Writing from India (1999) and most recently Secr
