Rukmini Bhaya Nair
Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Professor Hon. Emerita of Linguistics and Literature at the India Institute of Technology Delhi. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and was awarded a second honoris causa Doctorate by the University of Antwerp for her contributions to narrative theory. She has taught at universities ranging from Singapore to Stanford and delivered plenary addresses worldwide from Aarhus to Rio de Janeiro.
Nair’s research interests lie at the intersection of literary, linguistics and cognitive studies, including AI. Her work attempts to bring together what we know of the human mind in its evolutionary aspect and its everyday patterns of behaviour with what we know about current cultural patterns of social inclusion and exclusion on the Indian subcontinent and worldwide.
Ever since she won, as a student a prestigious Essay Prize in a competition organised by the La Stampa, Le Monde, Die Welt & The Times in conjunction with the First International Exhibition on Man & his Environment, Turin, Italy, Nair has been recipient of numerous awards ranging from the Tata Scholarship, to the US Sub-Sub-commission on Education and Culture Grant, to the Charles Wallace Award, while her appointments include being Fellow of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge (CRASSH), international GLOCAL Board Member at SOAS, London University, Distinguished Visting Professorship at Hunan University, China, and, most recently, until March 2026, Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary, London University. In 2026, Nair, a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, was invited back to Turin’s renowned Biennale Tecnologia as a featured speaker at the session “The New Rossetta Stone”, as she was to address plenaries at international conferences at Institute of Philosophy, Kyoto and at the University of Saarland in Germany, in connection with her latest book Deception (Bloomsbury Academic, UK and USA).
Author of around 150 articles and 11 books, including the widely acclaimed Narrative Gravity, Lying on the Postcolonial Couch and Poetry in a Time of Terror (all with Oxford University Press). she has coedited Keywords for India with Peter DeSouza in (2020), which is now being used a model to teach pragmatic methods of decolonisation at various fora in the Global South, especially in Africa. Selected a ‘Face of the Millennium’ among Indian writers by India Today, Nair is also an award-winning poet who has published three volumes of poetry with Penguin, titled The Hyoid Bone, The Ayodhya Cantos and Yellow Hibiscus. The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry (2014) writes that her work is “widely admired… for its postmodern approach to lyrical meaning and feminine identity”. Her first and only novel Mad Girl’s Love Song (Harper Collins) was described by the Nobel Prize winner, J.M Coetzee, as “intelligent and lively” and longlisted for the DC Books Prize, Nair’s writings, critical and creative have been included on the syllabi of Chicago, Harvard, Kent, Toronto and many other universities. For example, her poem ‘Gargi’s Silence’ is part of the English pass syllabus at DU.
Nair believes she does research in linguistics for the same reason that she writes poetry – to discover the limits and possibilities of language, held to be the most distinctive inheritance of the species homo sapiens.
