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Malavika Kasturi teaches South Asian history in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto. She completed her BA at Delhi University, her MA and MPhil at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and received her PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her monograph, 'Embattled Identities: Rajput Lineages and the Colonial State in Nineteenth Century Colonial North India' published by Oxford University Press in 2002, along with her related articles, analyzed the reconstitution of family and martial masculinities among elite lineages in British India against the backdrop of colonial ideologies and political culture. Her research interests encompass gender and households, monasticism and asceticism, religion in the public sphere, Hindu nationalism, and urban history. She is currently finalizing a book manuscript entitled ‘Producing Hindu Publics: Sadhus, Sampraday, and Hindu Nationalism in Twentieth Century India,’ exploring the intersection of monasticism with political entities promoting a vision of a Hindu nation. Another project, ‘The ‘Lost’ Mughal Pensioners of Banaras: ‘Diasporic’ Families, Memory, and Urban History in South Asia, 1800 Present’, funded by the SSHRC Insight grant, examines how elite Muslim households shaped urban space in cosmopolitan public culture at Hindu pilgrimage centres. Her research has appeared in notable journals and edited collections, and she is a research fellow at various prestigious institutions.
Department of Sociology