Kaifi Azmi (Author)
KAIFI AZMI (1919-2002) was one of the most prominent Urdu poets and lyricists of the twentieth century. An ardent crusader for justice as well as a writer of tender lyrics and rousing anthems, he was the quintessential activist-poet. His three major poetry collections are entitled Jhankar (1943), Akhir-e-Shab (1947) and Awara Sajde (1973).
Rakhshanda Jalil (Translator)
RAKHSHANDA JALIL is a writer, translator and literary historian. Her work on the Progressive Writers’ Movement is considered seminal; she has written A Rebel and Her Cause: The Life and Work of Dr Rashid Jahan, Shahryar: A Life in Poetry, among others. She runs Hindustani Awaaz, devoted to the popularization of Hindi-Urdu language and literary culture.
Sudipta Sen, Professor of History and current Director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program, University of California, Davis, is a historian of late Mughal and early British India and the British Empire. Sen has taught at Beloit College WI, University of California, Berkeley, and Syracuse University, NY. A former Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research fellow and Senior Fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities, in 2000 he won the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for his contribution to research and teaching at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University NY.
Sen’s work has largely focused on the early history of British expansion in India. He is the author of Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) and Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (Routledge, 2002).
His most recent book Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (Yale University Press, 2018) is an exploration of the idea of a cosmic, universal river at the interstices of myth, history, landscape and ecology. He is now finishing a book on the history of law, crime and punishment in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century British India.
Sen is an avid cook and enthusiastic musician of modest ability (congas, guitar, keyboard). He is working on his Arabic (still intermediate level) and a book of short stories, which will likely be published without footnotes or a bibliography.
Kim A. Wagner is senior lecturer in British Imperial History, Queen Mary, University of London. He has written three previous books on Thuggees and on the 1857 Uprising.
Amit Kapoor, PhD, is Honorary Chairman at Institute for Competitiveness, India; Visiting Scholar at Stanford University; President of India Council on Competitiveness and Editor-in-Chief of Thinkers. Amit is the author of bestsellers Riding the Tiger, which he has co-authored with Wilfried Aulber and The Age of Awakening: The Story of the Indian Economy Since Independence published by Penguin Random House.
Tehmina Aziz Ayub from Pakistan is married to a former diplomat and studied at the Quaid-e-Azam University Islamabad and Sussex University, UK.
Ankush Saikia was born in Tezpur, Assam, in 1975, and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin; Assam; and Shillong, Meghalaya. He worked in journalism and publishing in New Delhi for over a decade and was shortlisted for the Outlook-Picador India non-fiction writing award (2005). He is the author of Dead Meat (2015), Remember Death (2016) and More Bodies Will Fall (2018), among others. Saikia is currently based in Shillong and Tezpur in North-east India.
Shivam Shankar Singh headed data analytics and campaigns for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the Manipur and Tripura Legislative Assembly elections under the guidance of the party’s National General Secretary, Ram Madhav. He was a Senior Research Fellow at India Foundation, and briefly worked with Prashant Kishor’s company, IPAC, during the Punjab Legislative Assembly campaign. He was a Legislative Assistant to a Member of Parliament (LAMP) Fellow and has graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with a B.Sc. in Economics. His resignation from the BJP went viral on social media in June 2018 and was republished by various media platforms in multiple languages.
S.Y. QURAISHI joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1971 and rose to become the seventeenth chief election commissioner of India. He was featured in the Indian Express’ list of 100 Most Powerful Indians of 2011 and 2012. He introduced a number of electoral reforms, such as the creation of a voter education division, expenditure monitoring division, the India International Institute of Democracy and Election Management, and launched the National Voters Day. In October 2017, he was appointed the ambassador of democracy by International IDEA (Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance), Stockholm, of which he is a board member. He is the author of An Undocumented Wonder: The Making of the Great Indian Election.
Payal Kapadia grew up being any sort of girl she wanted to be, reading everything she could get her hands on and following her imagination wherever it took her. She studied English literature at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and received an MSc degree in journalism from Northwestern University, Chicago. She worked with Outlook magazine in Mumbai and the Japan Times in Tokyo-and ended up interviewing teenage gangs in inner cities, an elephant who paints for Christie’s and Japanese soldiers who fought under Subhash Chandra Bose. Her critically acclaimed debut, Wisha Wozzariter, won the 2013 Crossword Book Award for Children’s Writing and is featured in the 101 Indian Children’s Books We Love! compilation. She went on to write the bestselling school adventure series Horrid High. Her first book for grown-ups, Maidless in Mumbai, was a top pick on Amazon. When Payal isn’t reading at festivals and schools, she loves singing karaoke and travelling to new and strange lands (not just the ones inside her head). She lives in Mumbai with her husband, two daughters who enjoy breaking the rules just as much as she does, more laptops than one family should own up to owning and no dogs. Yet.
Nilima Chitgopekar is an associate professor in the department of history at Jesus and Mary College, Delhi University. She has authored six books and several articles and essays on Hindu gods and other related matters. She has been the recipient of prestigious fellowships from the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, the Charles Wallace India Trust and USIS, and has lectured widely in India and overseas. Chitgopekar has also worked with the BBC and been featured in their documentaries and radio programmes. More recently, in her attempt to take Hindu mythology to a far larger audience, she has been involved in making several online films of her lectures, which have sold worldwide.
