Area of Research
Interdisciplinary Law; Gender Studies; Human Rights
Biography
Dr Kalpana Kannabiran is a sociologist, legal researcher and feminist activist whose research, advocacy/teaching and writing (public and academic) have focused on intersecting questions of constitutionalism, law, non-discrimination, and gender in a postcolonial setting. Based in India, her work has critically engaged with questions in transnational/global contexts and in South Asia (region and diaspora), and has addressed questions of knowledge production in the global south and foregrounded decolonial imaginations as critical to the understanding of (anti-)socialities and the practice of politics. Her research over the long term has focused on sexual violence – taking a retrospective view of the case of Rameeza Bee (1978) in understanding the contemporary contexts of sexual assault and practices of impunity in cases of targeted assault in normal times.
Active in rights movements, Kalpana’s career has straddled three decadal stints –NGO sector advocacy, law school teaching, and doctoral and post-doctoral mentorship and academic administration as head of a research institute – the latter two publicly funded institutions. She was Civil Society Advisory Governor (Asia), Commonwealth Foundation, London, 2020-2022.
Kalpana received the VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research, 2003 and the Amartya Sen Award for Distinguished Social Scientists, 2012, from the Indian Council for Social Science Research, for her work in interdisciplinary law.
Citizenship
India
ViCAS Project
Jurisliteratures and Courtly Theatres in India: Performing the Constitution in a Postcolonial Setting
My project at ViCAS will explore the interiorities, embodiments and performance of the constitution in contexts where social movements and struggles for civil liberties mounted legal challenges to state violence and arbitrary state practice – detention, custodial violence and unfair trial. My specific focus on the decade of the 1970s, will draw threads from 1950 to the present, mapping the tangled experience of engagements with law, justice and the constitution (as spirit, as text, as eutopian imagination). The site of specific interest is the courtroom (and literatures therein) as an embodied space where words and their meanings have enduring aftermath(s) for lifeworlds and futures outside. The travels of contestations, interpretations, certitudes and dilemmas between the courtroom, legislative bodies, citizen mobilisations and vernacular literatures at different points in the history of the Indian Constitution offer valuable insights on the power of dialogue that births the idea of the constitution-as-commons. In this work, I draw on and amplify my earlier work in translation and archiving of court records, memoirs and creative writing, mapping the field of Indian jurisliteratures, in an attempt to point to the ways in which theatres of the constitution defy confinement to courtly enclosures and challenge interpretative monologues within courts.
Recent Publications
- Kannabiran K (2026). “Suffering and Resistance: Essays on Anti-Caste Feminist Praxis.” New Delhi: Women Unlimited.
- Kannabiran K (2025). “Law, Justice, Society: Selected Works of Upendra Baxi (Volume 3: Law & Society).” New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Editor.
- Kannabiran K (2022). “The Speaking Constitution: A Sisyphean Life in Law by K.G. Kannabiran (Translated, compiled, edited and with an introduction by Kalpana Kannabiran).” New Delhi: HarperCollins.