Chandranshu Yadav

Chandranshu Yadav recently graduated with a B.A. (Honours with Research) in History from Ashoka University. His interests lie in the social and cultural histories of the Gangetic region, particularly questions of caste, gender, vernacular public cultures, and the politics of emotions. His current work examines how newly educated members of a peasant-pastoral caste used Hindi print culture in the late colonial period to produce new emotional and political vocabularies of caste assertion. Through pamphlets, tracts, and caste periodicals, he explores how emotional politics functioned as a pedagogy of reform, respectability, and collective self-fashioning.

The idea that education must be a ‘dialogue’ rather than a ‘deposit’ resonates deeply with him and has shaped his academic and public engagements. At Ashoka, he worked as a Teaching Assistant across three History courses and as a Research Assistant for the History Department’s Archiving the Modern project, where he documented Bhojpuri folk-song traditions of the ‘lower’ castes. Beyond the university, internships at Deccan Heritage Foundation, Aagaaz Theatre Trust, and The Print exposed him to heritage field research, theatre-based pedagogy, and public-facing journalism, respectively. These experiences strengthened his belief that scholarship must remain engaged with wider public worlds beyond the academy.

To further extend his research undertaken as an undergraduate, he will now be pursuing an MSc in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford, which he sees as a crucial bridge towards a PhD. The programme is of significant interest to him because of its interdisciplinary training and research component, alongside linguistic and regional specialisation in South Asia. More broadly, his research at Oxford would be concerned with how non-elite caste groups produce political subjectivities through everyday genres such as print, song, legend, and performance, and the ways these genres unsettle elite epistemologies of the political.

Stuti Rai

Stuti is a criminal lawyer whose work lies at the intersection of criminal and constitutional law. A graduate of the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, she has worked extensively on issues relating to capital punishment, anti-terror legislations, and civil liberties. Through she has worked primarily as an advocate in the courts of India, she has occasionally found herself at the teaching end of classrooms and dabbled in legal research.

After graduation, Stuti joined the legal clinic at Project 39-A, NLU Delhi, where she spent more than two years working on the defence of persons on death row across the country. Here, she also contributed to the preparation of a first-of-its-kind prosecutorial policy on death-penalty sentencing; and drafted a challenge to hanging as a mode of execution in India. After leaving the organisation, she has worked both independently and with senior advocate Nitya Ramakrishnan on matters affecting media independence, religious freedom, and national security. 

Through the course of her work, Stuti has become increasingly interested in the gap between formal guarantees of law and the lived realities of criminal process. She will pursue the LL.M. at the University of Cambridge, in order to engage more deeply with the conceptual foundations underlying her work and enquiries, especially through the study of constitutionalism and political philosophy. In the long term, she hopes to contribute to Indian legal discourse through a combination of litigation, scholarship and teaching, and institutional engagement. 

Outside of her casefiles, Stuti is a seasonal creature. In the winters, she enjoys exploring the mysteries of the chemical world trying to find eclectic baking recipes. But in the summer, you are more likely to find her in a pool grappling with sixth grade physics as she tries to invent swimming strokes.

Jishnu Kesh

Jishnu Kesh is an aspiring researcher in animal behaviour and primatology, having graduated with a Master’s in Biology from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali.

His primary research interests are in social behaviour in group-living species and human-wildlife interactions. Having previously worked on sociality in jungle babblers, conservation and long-distance movements in bats, and anthropogenic impact on ghost crabs, Jishnu conducted his Master’s dissertation on understanding the impact of social factors along with demography and environmental exposure to anthropogenic food on the gut microbial composition and diversity in a population of wild long-tailed macaques in Thailand.

Jishnu will pursue a PhD in Biological Anthropology within the department of Archaeology at University of Cambridge with Dr. Sylvain Lemoine. Continuing his interest in the origin and impact of sociality, he plans to study the effect of social tolerance and sociodemographic characteristics in impacting which group a dispersing male macaque will join. Using a multi-species approach, the project aims to throw light on dispersal strategies and social tolerance in macaques. The project plans to use a combination of available online literature and complementary fieldwork at Gibraltar to its questions.

Apart from his work, Jishnu spends most of his time traveling, collecting primate shirts and mementos and just relaxing with a cozy movie.

Sivaranjani HC Rajan

Sivaranjani is a passionate aerospace researcher and controls engineer currently working at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre under the Indian Space Research Organisation.

She graduated with a Bachelor’s in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram in 2022. In addition to her coursework, she ventured into research in spacecraft attitude & orbit control systems, optimization and computational fluid dynamics. She was an active member of the student satellite team and carried out an internship in attitude control algorithms. Her project work was in implementing artificial neural networks for replicating CFD data and carrying out adjoint- based optimization of a supersonic parachute design. Tackling complex design issues in a methodological way by applying cutting edge technology helped her gain a deeper appreciation for science, technology and engineering.

As a scientist/engineer working at ISRO, Sivaranjani excelled at combining theoretical concepts, applying design thinking and developing engineering solutions. She took great delight in designing, modelling and testing a variety of hydraulic and pneumatic systems to fruition - including but not limited to electro-hydraulic actuation system for developmental launch vehicles, plant growth experiment in microgravity and brake system for reusable vehicles. She has also taken great strides in the indigenous development of strategic control components, implementing Make-in-India solutions geared towards supply chain independence.

Sivaranjani will be pursuing a Master’s in Advanced Aeronautical Engineering at Imperial College, London. The skills gained through the course and associated industry exposure shall enable her to develop systems better, applying technology that borders on research and optimising their performance for the benefit of ISRO.

She craves a creative outlet from time to time and paints her woes away as an amateur landscape artist. She also enjoys reading novels, veering towards crime thrillers and historical fiction.