Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (born 1950) is an Indian feminist scholar, a professor in English, and author of several books on issues related to feminism and gender. Her research interest has covered many subjects such as of the pre and post colonial period, Indian English writing, gender and cultural issues related to South Asia, and the English literature of the Victorian era. She has also edited a series called the "Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism", and "Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India". She has authored many books of which the notable ones are the Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India and Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism.

Biography Rajan was born in present-day Mumbai, Maharashtra in 1950. Her initial college education was in Bombay University from where she received a degree of Bachelor of Arts (B.A) in English in 1969 and a Master of Arts (M.A) degree in English in 1971. Later, she pursued for her doctoral degree in George Washington University, Washington DC and obtained her Ph.D. in English.

Rajan has debated on issues of gender, postcolonialism and culture in relation to nationalist issues in Independent India. Her research work has covered English literature of the nineteenth-century United Britain including literature of the Anglophone postcolonial period. Her editing assignments have covered issues in Indian Feminism. She is also a Joint Editor of Interventions, an international journal of postcolonial studies.

Publications The Lie of the land: English literary studies in India (1992) The Prostitution Question(s): (female) Agency, Sexuality and Work (1996) Is the Hindu Goddess a Feminist? (1997) Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-independence India (1999) Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (2003) The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in India (2003) The Postcolonial Jane Austen (with You-Me Park) (2015) Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World, co-ed with Supriya Chaudhuri, Josephine McDonagh, and Brian Murray, London and New York, Routledge, 2017