Archives: Authors

Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) was one of the greatest Urdu poets who was most well-known for his ghazals. He lived during the reign of the last Mughal king, whose court was the centre of the golden age of Urdu poetry. Chiragh-e Dair is a masnavi he wrote on the city of Banaras en route to Calcutta.

Maaz Bin Bilal is a poet, translator, and academic. His first collection Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu (2019) was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. Maaz was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship in writing and translation in Wales (2018-19) and has also just received the Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship in writing (2022).

Virat Chirania is a young and dynamic trainer with over 5000 hours of training experience in India and abroad. Virat is a TEDx speaker and a certified Life Coach. Virat is also a senior Art of Living Teacher and has been teaching meditation workshops for over a decade now.

Virat has taught in some of the top educational institutes and also corporate houses and brings to the table a rich and diverse experience along with lightness and humour.

Abhirami Girija Sriram is an editor and translator. Currently, she is the chief sub-editor of Frontline magazine.

K.S. Bijukumar is the co-translator of this book, and he lives in Chennai.

Tridip Suhrud is a scholar, writer and translator who works on the intellectual and cultural history of modern Gujarat and the Gandhian intellectual tradition. As the director and chief editor of the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust (2012-17), Ahmedabad, he was responsible for creating a digital archive-the Gandhi Heritage Portal-of all of M.K. Gandhi’s works. Apart from a number of books on Gandhi’s life, Suhrud has co-edited the critical annotated edition of Hind Swaraj, edited the critial annotated edition of An Autobiography, or My Experiments with Truth, translated Narayan Desai’s four-volume biography of Gandhi, My Life Is My Message, and translated the four-volume epic Gujarati novel, Sarasvatichandra.

Suhrud is presently translating the diaries of Manu Gandhi, covering the period between 1942 and 1948, compiling a series ‘Letters to Gandhi’-of unpublished correspondence to Gandhi-and working on an eight-volume compendium of testimonies of the indigo cultivators of Champaran. Tridip Suhrud is provost at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, and director of Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology.

Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey has been a journalist for twenty-four years. She started her career with the Statesman and later joined the Times of India. Since 2007 she has been writing both fiction and non-fiction in English and Bengali. She also translates from both languages.

Garima Garg is a journalist and an author. Born and brought up in Delhi, she studied economics at Delhi University and attended Columbia University for her MS in Journalism. She writes about culture and her work has been published in various Indian and international publications over the years. In her spare time, she can be found travelling or experimenting as a photographer with her digital, film, and polaroid cameras. She lives with her family in Delhi.

Devdip Ganguli teaches undergraduate students at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry, where he offers courses on the social and political philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, as well as on ancient Indian history, art and culture. He is frequently invited to speak in universities in India and abroad on topics related to Sri Aurobindo’s writings.
He also works in one of the administrative departments of Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

Akshaya Mukul is the author of Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015), which won every major non-fiction award in India on its release, including the Crossword Book Award, Ramnath Goenka Award, Tata Literature Live Award, Atta-Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Prize and the Shakti Bhatt Award. Mukul is the recipient of the Homi Bhabha, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund and the New India Foundation fellowships. He has contributed essays to Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century, edited by Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Peter Ronald deSouza, and A Functioning Anarchy? Essays for Ramachandra Guha, edited by Srinath Raghavan and Nandini Sundar.