Ashis Nandy has worked for more than thirty-five years on two diametrically opposite domains of social existence — human potentialities and human destructiveness. It is the oscillation between these two domains that defines his work. Even in his ongoing study of genocides in South Asia, the emphasis is on the resistance offered by ordinary people to organised machine violence and ethno-nationalism. This has brought him close to social movements and non-state political actors grappling with issues of peace, human rights, inter-civilizational dialogue, environment, and cultural survival. Nandy has been trying hard during the last so many decades to de-professionalize himself and to allow his work to be contaminated by the categories, worldviews and forms of social criticism that could be built upon vernacular
subjectivities. Nandy is a Honorary Senior Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and Distinguished Fellow of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies,  Melbourne. In 2007, he received the Grand Prize of the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prizes and, in 2008, he was chosen as one of the top 100 intellectuals of the world by the magazine Foreign Policy and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Peter Robb is Professor Emeritus and formerly Professor of the History of India, Chair of the Centre of South Asian Studies, Head of the Department of History and Pro-Director at  SOAS (University of London). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow, Council-member and former president of the  Royal Asiatic Society. He is currently working on the late 19th-century, a book tentatively called The British and Bihar: Development in a  Colonial Society. His 10 edited or co-edited volumes cover Indo-British relations,  institutions, rural South Asia, local agrarian societies, protest and identity, ideologies, race, Dalit movements and labour, agriculture and development. Of his nine monographs, three are about early Calcutta and four wholly or partly on the 19th – and 20th-century Bihar.

Ashutosh Varshney is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he also directs the Brown-India Initiative. Previously, he taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His  books include Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India; Democracy, Development and the Countryside; Urban-Rural Struggles in  India; India in the Era of Economic Reforms; Midnight’s Diaspora; Collective Violence in Indonesia; and Battles Half Won: India’s Improbable Democracy. His academic articles have appeared in the leading journals of political science and development. His honours include the Guggenheim, Carnegie, Luebbert and Lerner awards. He is a contributing editor for The Indian Express and his guest columns have appeared in many other newspapers, including the Financial Times. He served on the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s Task Force on Millennium Development Goals and has also served as advisor to the World Bank and United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president and chief executive of the Centre for Policy Research, is a political scientist who has taught at Harvard University, JNU and the New York University School of Law. His areas of research include political theory, constitutional law, society and politics in India, governance and political economy and international affairs. He has served on many central government committees, including India’s National Security Advisory Board, the Prime Minister of India’s National Knowledge Commission and a Supreme Court-appointed committee on elections in Indian universities. Mehta is a prolific writer and an editorial consultant to The Indian Express and his columns have appeared in a number of reputed dailies. He is also on the editorial boards of many academic journals, including the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Democracy and India and Global Affairs. Mehta holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford and a PhD in politics from Princeton.