Ananya Vajpeyi is a Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. An intellectual historian, political theorist and writer, she was educated in Delhi, Oxford, and Chicago. Her book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (2012), won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press, the Crossword Award for Non-Fiction, the Tata First Book Prize for Non-Fiction, and was listed among the Books of the Year by The Guardian and The New Republic. Apart from her scholarly work, she writes widely for newspapers and journals in India and abroad. She edited AROOP: Journal of Art, Ideas and Poetry of the Raza Foundation from 2019 to 2024. Her translation of her late father Kailash Vajpeyi's Hindi poems Signature on the Wind has been published by the Sahitya Akademi in 2026. She is currently completing a book about the modern life of Sanskrit. Email: ananya.vajpeyi [at] gmail.com
by Ananya Vajpeyi In the early 1990s, I began listening to qawwali in a serious way. In 1994 I happened upon a recording of one of the great performances of the Pakistani maestro, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He must have been addressing an audience outside South Asia because he began the concert with a sentence…