Living Pluralities

Indira Chandrasekhar is a scientist, writer, literary curator, and founder, publisher and principal editor of the award-winning literary journal, Out of Print. An anthology marking ten years of the magazine was brought out with Context Books in 2020 and reissued in 2023. With a PhD in Biophysics, she worked in primary research laboratories in India, the US and Switzerland. Her research on the dynamics of biological macromolecules has influenced many of the stories in her collection, Polymorphism, published by HarperCollins. She is the principal author of the volume Celebrating the Arts: Forty years of the International Music and Arts Society in Bangalore.

Chandan Gowda is Ramakrishna Hegde Chair Professor of Decentralization and Development at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru. A book of his essays titled, Another India: Events, Memories, People, has just been published. At present, he is completing a book on the cultural politics of development in the old Mysore and co-translating and editing Daredevil Mustafa, a book of short stories by the Kannada writer, Purnachandra Tejasvi.  He is a columnist with Deccan Herald.

Prashant Keshavmurthy is Associate Professor of Persian-Iranian Studies in the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. He is the author of Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi: Building an Ark (Routledge, 2016) and co-translator of Sohrab Sepehri, The Eight Books: A Complete English Translation (Brill, 2022). He has completed a full translation into English blank verse of Amir Khusraw’s mixed genre poem from 1318, The Nine Skies, and is writing a monograph on craving and craft in the quintet of the great twelfth century poet Niẓāmī of Ganja.

Jahnavi Phalkey was appointed Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru in November 2018. Previously Jahnavi held a tenured faculty position at King’s College London. She started her academic career at the University of Heidelberg, following which she was based at Georgia Tech-Lorraine, France, and Imperial College London. Jahnavi was Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin). She was also external curator to the Science Museum London, and has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich.

Jahnavi is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India and has co-edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century. She is the producer-director of the documentary film Cyclotron.

Jahnavi read civics and politics at the University of Bombay and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She holds a doctoral degree in history of science and technology.

Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi teaches history and humanities at Krea University. His research and writing focus on the literary and religious histories of South India, Indian intellectual traditions and higher education in contemporary India.