Contributors

Namrata Acharya currently resides in Ahmedabad. After a master’s in economics from Delhi, she worked for a few years as an editor at Oxford University Press, Delhi. Post her MPhil in development practice from Ambedkar University Delhi and her stint with the development sector, she continues to delve on alternative ways of doing development ethically, focusing more on the process rather than the product, by way of research and practice. She loves to read, travel to meet friends, and cycle.

Manan Ahmed Asif is a historian and walker. He is the author, most recently, of The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (2020). He teaches in New York City.

Padmaja Gungun is a writer, photographer, and theatre artist. She posts @_padmaja.

Aayushi Gupta is a final-year architecture student at the Jindal School of Art and Architecture, Sonipat, and a mixed-media artist. She is interested in how cities transform and are held within collective memories.

Shiraz Husain is a visual artist and graphic designer. He is the founder member of Khwaab Tanha Collective, which celebrates Urdu and Hindi literature through visual reimaginings, and has also taught applied arts. Shiraz curates the Saiyidain Manzil Sessions, a cultural space for arts, literature, and cinema. He is currently working on a set of children’s books. He posts as @khwaabtanha.

Samprati Pani is a social anthropologist working on the streets and bazaars of Delhi through intersections of urban informality, design, and spatial practices. She is currently a research fellow at the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, New Delhi, and is working on a project on repair and maintenance practices of marketplaces in north India. Samprati has previously worked in academic publishing for many years and was the co-founder of a design studio that specialises in book design. A walk in the crowded bazaars of Delhi, she believes, is a cure for migraine, heartache, and any other ailment. She is the editor of the blog and can be contacted at samprati.pani@gmail.com.

Swati Pathak dwells between the bylanes of loitering and writing. A Pune-based urban practitioner, she works @parisar_org on issues of sustainable mobility, gender, and climate action. An amateur but keen bird watcher, she reserves her ethnographic eye to document cities and streets @weloiter and architecture @punehouses.

Mumbai Paused, aka Gopal MS, is a blogger who has been documenting the streets of Mumbai for over a decade. An advertising copywriter by profession, he is a keen observer and chronicler of everyday life in a changing city. He posts daily on @mumbaipaused and also shares his work in the form of photo books.

Poorva Rajaram is a historian with an interest in economic history, gender history, and the histories of capitalism, welfare, and biopolitics. Rajaram was a co-founder of the feminist web magazine The Ladies Finger and has worked as a journalist at Tehelka magazine. Her writings have appeared in publications like The Caravan, The Hindu, and Yahoo! Originals. She is currently a research fellow at the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF), New Delhi.

Sailen Routray is a writer and translator based in Bhubaneswar. His interests lie in the anthropology of development and governance, food studies, vernacular urbanisms, educational alternatives, life writing, and the contemporary history of Odisha. He has translated across Odia, Hindi, and English, including the education classic Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, essays of Arundhati Roy, Odia modernist poetry, and children’s literature. He blogs at sailenroutray.blogspot.com.

Somok Roy @shauq.i.fuzul studies the history of Islam in South Asia, c.1200–1800 CE. He has a master’s in medieval and early modern history from the Department of History, University of Delhi. He loves to put the archive in conversation with spaces that exist beyond it. He also writes on sounds, spaces, and images located in and across time.

Mila Samdub is a writer and curator based in New Delhi. Mila studied creative writing at Bard College in upstate New York. His writing has been published in Art India, Real Life Magazine and elsewhere. He is passionate about infrastructure, trees, and queer futurities. He occasionally posts on Instagram as @delhimodernism.

Mohammad Sayeed was among the founder members of Chiragh Dilli, and was associated with the blog from January 2017 to June 2018. He works on the anthropology of congestion, looking at the precarity of social relations in urban spaces.

Nishpriha Thakur has been working on Surat’s bazaars, old city areas, and the textile and diamond industries since 2013. Currently pursuing a PhD in sociology from Shiv Nadar University, her research interests include marketplace languages, tangible and intangible forms of belongingness in a city, and everyday routines in cityscapes.

Sarover Zaidi, a philosopher and social anthropologist, has worked on Indian Ocean architectures, urbanism, and everyday life in Bombay. She has previously lived in a Buddhist nunnery, worked on issues of poverty, health, and right to food across Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, and learnt how to centre clay pots. She obsessively collects images of Hindu goddesses and iconography in Islam and  Christianity. Sarover curates ‘Elementary Forms’, an interdisciplinary forum on art, architecture, and anthropology, and currently teaches at School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, and Jindal School of Art & Architecture, Sonipat. She tweets at @bombaywalee and can be contacted at saroverzaidi@gmail.com.