Lakshmi Subramanian

Lakshmi Subramanian is an Indian historian with a long and distinguished teaching and research career. She did her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in History from Calcutta University and then pursued her doctoral degree in history at the University of Viswa Bharati (Santiniketan) under the mentorship of Dr Ashin Dasgupta. Subsequently, she received several prestigious fellowships in the UK, Singapore, Australia and South Africa to develop her research work. She has taught in a number of universities in India, South Africa, Poland and Germany.

She has served at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta (CSSSC) in the capacity of Research Professor and Dean (Academic Studies) and has been Visiting Professor to several universities including the University of Glasgow, Jawaharlal Nehru University, The Flinders University of Adelaide, University of Gottingen, Indian Institute of Science and University of Singapore. Currently, she has been researching with the Godrej Archives in Mumbai, is Professor at the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, BITS Pilani (Goa), and also Associate Member at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Nantes, France.

Lakshmi has authored over ten books on the economic and cultural history of India, her particular subfields of interest being trade and social networks in the Indian Ocean, histories of predation and the social history of music in modern south India. Some of her major works are The Sovereign and the Pirate Ordering Maritime Subjects in India's Western Littoral, Three Merchants of Bombay, A History of India 1707-1857, Veena Dhanammal: The Making of a Legend, New Mansions for Music Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism, From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A social history of music in South India, and Singing Gandhi's India: Music And Sonic Nationalism.