India Network
TEJASWINI NIRANJANA
Tejaswini Niranjana is a Visiting Professor with the School of Arts and Science at Ahmedabad University. She is currently Professor and Head, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She has previously headed the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and was Indian-language advisor to Wikipedia. She is the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (1992), Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (2020).
PATRICK FRENCH
Patrick French is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University, and Professor for the Public Understanding of the Humanities. His works of history and biography have won awards including the Hawthornden Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Royal Society of Literature WH Heinemann Prize and the US National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2016-18, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge University.
DAUD ALI
Daud Ali is an associate professor in the South Asian Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania. An historian of pre-Mughal South Asia, he previously taught history at SOAS, University of London, and has published on subjects including courtly and monastic discipline, mercantile practices, conventions in erotic poetry and courtship, slavery, ideas of space, time and history in inscriptions, and gardens and landscape in the medieval Deccan. His publications include, in 2016, 'Bhoja's Mechanical Garden: Translating Wonder across the Indian Ocean, circa 800-1100 CE'.
Shiju Sam Varughese
Dr Shiju Sam Varughese is an assistant professor at the Centre for Studies in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy in the School of Social Sciences of Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. His primary fields of research are Science, Technology and Society (STS) Studies, and History and Philosophy of Science (HPS). He has authored Contested Knowledge: Science, Media, and Democracy in Kerala (2017) and edited (along with Satheese Chandra Bose) Kerala Modernity: Ideas, Spaces and Practices in Transition (2015).
SAMIT BASU
Samit Basu is a novelist, film director, and screenwriter. Samit is best known for his fantasy and science fiction work. His first novel, The Simoqin Prophecies, published by Penguin India in 2003, was the first book in the bestselling Gameworld Trilogy and marked the beginning of Indian English fantasy writing. The other books in the trilogy are The Manticore’s Secret and The Unwaba Revelations.
Samrat sengupta
Dr Samrat Sengupta is Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of English at Sammilani Mahavidyalaya under the University of Calcutta. His research interests include Experimental Bengali Literature, Gender studies, Post-structuralism, Memory Studies, Philosophy of Technology and Posthumanism. He has co-edited a volume on Bengali experimental writer Nabarun Bhattacharya titled Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics. His important publications include a book chapter and a journal article on Technology and Power relating to the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler.
Ram sewak sharma
Ram Sewak Sharma is the former Chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and was the first Director-General of the UIDAI. His recent book The Making of Aadhaar (2020) provides a lucid and in-depth understanding of the creation of this one-of-a-kind system. Alongside Nandan Nilekani, Ram Sewak Sharma led the team that developed the technology that undergirds Aadhaar, enrolled the resident population of India, created an online authentication mechanism, and operationalised the ecosystem to take advantage of a digital identity.
Manoj Kumar Pandey
Manoj Kumar Pandey is a Hindi writer based in the city of Allahabad, India. He has four highly acclaimed collections of stories, namely Shahtoot, Paani, Khazana, and Badalta Hua Desh. Several of his stories have been adapted for stage and films, and his writings have been widely translated into a number of Indian languages. He has won numerous awards for his writing including Vanmali Yuwa Katha Samman (2019), Ravindra Kalia Smriti Katha Samman (2017), Spandan Kriti Samman (2015), Yuva Puraskaar of Bhartiya Bhasha Parishad (2014).
SRIKANTH NADHAMUNI
Srikanth Nadhamuni is a technologist and entrepreneur who spent a decade and a half in California’s Silicon Valley designing CPUs, developing software products, and creating internet startups. He moved to India in 2002 to work on social development initiatives and partnered with Nandan Nilekani (then CEO of Infosys) to start the eGovernments Foundation. Later, as Head of Technology for the UID Authority of India, he set up a centre that designed a biometric-based Identity Management system for India’s 1.3 billion population for Aadhaar. He is currently the CEO of Khosla Labs.
ARUN SUKUMAR
Arun Mohan Sukumar is a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, and a junior fellow at the school’s Centre for International Law and Governance. He heads the Technology Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. His book Midnight’s Machines: A Political History of Technology in India explores the reasons why India embraced or rejected new technologies and provides a new way to understand and appreciate the individual moments that brought the country into the twenty-first century.
S. B. DIVYA
S. B. Divya is an author, editor, and engineer. She has worked for 20 years as an electrical engineer in various fields including pattern recognition, machine intelligence, high speed communications, digital music, and medical devices. Divya is the Hugo and Nebula nominated author of Runtime and co-editor of Escape Pod, with Mur Lafferty. Her thrilling and thought-provoking debut novel Machinehood (2021)asks: if we won’t see machines as human, will we instead see humans as machines?
Rashi Maheshwari
Rashi Maheshwari is a Research Assistant at Ahmedabad University with a background in literature, gender, and media studies. She holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Delhi and an MA in Liberal Studies with a concentration in Literature from Ashoka University.
CHINMAYI ARUN
Dr Chinmayi Arun is an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center of Internet & Society at Harvard University, having been a fellow from 2017-2019 and a faculty associate of the Center prior to that. She is currently a resident fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Her recent writing has focused on online propaganda and on the impact of AI and algorithms on human rights in the Global South. Chinmayi also writes and lectures on questions of platform governance, surveillance, digital identity, and the right to privacy.
NOOPUR RAVAL
Dr Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher at the AI Now Institute at New York University. She is an interdisciplinary researcher at the intersection of Informatics, Anthropology, and Media Studies and her doctoral research looked at how gig economy platforms have reconfigured labor and sociopolitical relations in urban India. Currently, Noopur is researching colonial legacies in information systems and their effects on AI deployments in post-colonies. Noopur is also studying the global knowledge work of data annotators and their role in shaping AI datasets.
TANUJ SOLANKI
Tanuj Solanki is the author of the 2020 novel The Machine is Learning, which explores twenty-first-century workplaces, love, and the impact of technology in all of our lives. The novel was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature 2020, where the jury called it “a deep dive into the world of Artificial Intelligence and the lives of people around it.” Tanuj's short fiction has been published in the Caravan, Hindu Business Line, DNA, Out of Print, and several other publications.
SAUMYA MALVIYA
Saumya Malviya is an assistant professor at the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University. He is trained as a social anthropologist and specialises in the sociology of mathematical knowledge. His doctoral research involved an ethnographic study of mathematics and mathematicians across institutional contexts in India. He is working on a monograph titled ‘Mathematics as a Form of Life: An Ethnographic Study’.