Recipient of the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship (2024-26), Rahul Ramagundam is the author of The Life and Times of George Fernandes (Penguin Random House, 2022), an acclaimed biography of the maverick socialist leader, who was also India’s Defence Minister. The book took twelve years to complete and was received remarkably well by reviewers and readers. For this biography of the socialist leader, he was awarded the New India Foundation’s Book Writing Fellowship(2018). His other works include Gandhi’s Khadi: A History of Contention and Conciliation (Orient Blackswan, 2008), originally his doctoral thesis submitted to Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Including the Socially Excluded: India’s Experience with Caste, Gender and Poverty (Orient Blackswan, 2017), which largely draws from his ethnographic fieldwork on poverty issues in Gaya district of Bihar. His first book, however, is Defeated Innocence: Adivasi Assertion, Land Rights and Ekta Parishad Movement, a chronicle of a people’s movement he was part of as a student at JNU. His works are a blend of archival history and social anthropology. He has been teaching at Jamia Millia Islamia since 2008.