Rachel Fell McDermott is professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College. She is a specialist in Bengali goddess worship whose books include Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal: The Fortunes of Hindu Festivals; Singing to the Goddess: Poems to Kali and Uma from Bengal; and Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams: Kali and Uma in the Devotional Poetry of Bengal.
Leonard A. Gordon is professor of history emeritus of the City University of New York and the author of Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Subhas and Sarat Chandra Bose and Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1876-1940. He is also the director of the Taraknath Das Foundation.
Ainslie T. Embree is professor of history emeritus of Columbia University. Since his retirement, he has taught at Brown University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is the editor of Sources of Indian Tradition: From the Beginning to 1800, Volume 1, Second Edition.
Frances W. Pritchett is professor emerita of modern Indic languages in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Among her books are Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics and The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamzah. She is pursuing major online projects that include A Desertful of Roses and A Garden of Kashmir, commentaries on the Urdu ghazal poetry of Ghalib and Mir.
Dennis Dalton is professor emeritus of political science at Barnard College. He is the author of Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action and Indian Idea of Freedom: Political Thought of Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore and the editor of Mahatma Gandhi: Selected Political Writings.
Dhaval Kulkarni is a Mumbai-based journalist with over fifteen years of reporting experience across brands like the Times of India, Hindustan Times, the Indian Express, New Indian Express and DNA. He writes on a broad range of subjects like governance and politics, caste, identity and social movements, environment and forests, health, infrastructure, heritage, culture and archaeology. He also reviews books.
Shivya Nath is a travel writer who grew up in the Indian Himalayas, and quit her corporate job at age 23 with a dream of travelling the world. She pursued a nomadic life for nearly seven years, living out of two bags, spending time with local and Indigenous communities. Her work focuses on the intersection of meaningful travel, climate action and social impact. In her first book, The Shooting Star: A girl, her backpack and the world (Penguin, 2018), Shivya documents her journey from the cubicle to a nomadic life, and from small town India to remote corners of the globe. It has sold over 20,000 copies to date. Her blog is read by nearly half a million people annually, and her words have appeared in BBC Travel, Lonely Planet, National Geographic Traveller, The Washington Post, Travel + Leisure and Conde Nast Traveller, among other leading publications. She has been featured by The Washington Post among travellers changing the way we think about the world, by National Geographic Traveller among travellers of colour smashing stereotypes, and in the BBC film, The Audacious, on living your best (sustainable) life. She is a recipient of the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards. Shivya is the founder of Climate Conscious Travel, where she works on climate research and storytelling through the lens of travel. She also runs The Shooting Star Academy, where she offers impact storytelling courses and workshops for both urban and rural audiences. She has delivered talks on sustainable travel and climate action in tourism at national and international forums, including COP30, the ASEAN-India Forum, UN Tourism regional conferences and the World Community Tourism Summit. She holds a Master’s in Sustainability from Harvard University (DCE). Blog: the-shooting-star.com Newsletter: theshootingstar.substack.com Courses and workshops: theshootingstaracademy.com Instagram: @shivya Youtube: The Shooting Star Stories
Pankaj Mishra is the author of From the Ruins of Empire and several other books. He is a columnist at Bloomberg View and the New York Times Book Review, and writes regularly for The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the New Yorker. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London.
Allan Sealy has authored eight books and won many awards, including the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and the Padma Shri. His novel The Everest Hotel: A Calendar was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker prize.
Raza Mir grew up in Hyderabad, and teaches management at William Paterson University, USA. He is the author of The Taste of Words: An Introduction to Urdu Poetry and the co-author of Anthems of Resistance: A Celebration of Progressive Urdu Poetry. He can be reached at urduwallah@gmail.com
Mohammed Hanif was born in Okara, Pakistan. He graduated from the Pakistan Air Force Academy as Pilot Officer but subsequently left to pursue a career in journalism. His first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel. His second novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, was shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Prize. He has written the libretto for an opera called Bhutto, commissioned by the Lyric Theater in Illinois, which premiered with the Pittsburgh Opera in 2019. He has also written for the stage and screen, including a BBC radio play, What Now, Now That We Are Dead? He writes regularly for the New York Times, BBC Urdu, and BBC Punjabi, and currently splits his time between Berlin and Karachi.
Saadat Hasan Manto has been called the greatest short story writer of the Indian subcontinent. He was born in 1912 in Punjab and went on to become a radio and film-script writer, journalist, and short story writer. His stories were highly controversial and he was tried for obscenity six times during his career. After Partition, Manto moved to Lahore with his wife and three daughters. He died there in 1955.
V.S. Ramachandran is the Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, Professor in the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Programme at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He has also been elected to fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford, and the Royal Institution, London (which also awarded him the Henry Dale Medal), and has received the Padma Bhushan. Newsweek named him a member of ‘The Century Club’, and one of the ‘one hundred most prominent people to watch’ in the twenty-first century.
Aftab Ahmad earned his PhD in Urdu literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has received a PEN translation grant and taught at AIIS Lucknow, UC Berkeley. He teaches at Columbia University.
