Ananya Vajpeyi The Life of Sanskrit

About this episode

My guest this month is Ananya Vajpeyi (read more about her and her main publications here). Her current academic home is the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi. As you will hear, I did not have a lot of work this time: Ananya only required minimal prompting to tell me the story of her life so far, which spans several countries in three continents and many fascinating encounters in and around academia.

Ananya’s many teachers include Arindam Chakrabarti, Madhu Khanna, Robert Young, Alexis Sanderson, Jim Benson, Matthew Kapstein, Patrick Olivelle, David Shulman, Sheldon Pollock, Gayatri Spivak and Wendy Doniger. She has worked closely with Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Ashis Nandy and Rajeev Bhargava.

She studied and did research at Lady Shri Ram College, the School of Languages at JNU, the University of Oxford, the University of Chicago, the University of Pune, Deccan College and the Bhandarkar Institute.

Read more about Ferdinand de Saussure and his Course in General Linguistics, the volume resulting from the 'Ideology and Status of Sanskrit conference; about shudras, Shivaji, Ambedkar and Jim Laine; the Murty Library and the controversy around its editor; and about the fellowships at the Kluge Center and at CRASSH.