Malavika Kasturi

Malavika Kasturi serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, with cross-appointments as graduate faculty in the Department of History and Centre for the Study of Religion. Her scholarship critically examines intersections of religion, gender, and political power in South Asia through colonial legal frameworks and urban histories, positioning her at the forefront of historical studies on Hindu nationalism and monastic traditions.

Her educational foundation includes:

• PhD from the University of Cambridge
• MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
• MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
• BA from Delhi University, India

Kasturi's research centers on monasticism's political dimensions, with primary expertise in ascetic lineages, guru movements, and urban sacred spaces. She investigates how religious institutions negotiate state power through legal archives and ethnographic approaches, particularly examining gendered household formations, Hindu nationalist articulations, and Mughal diaspora communities in Hindu-majority pilgrimage centers. Her methodological rigor combines historical anthropology with colonial legal analysis to reveal continuities between pre-colonial practices and contemporary identity politics.

Her publication trajectory demonstrates deepening engagement with monastic networks' political mobilization, evolving from Rajput lineage studies in colonial North India toward contemporary analyses of Hindutva's monastic foundations. Recent work increasingly focuses on Banaras as a contested urban space where Muslim pensioner communities reshape Hindu pilgrimage landscapes, reflecting her signature approach of using micro-histories to interrogate macro-political formations.

Her scholarly recognition includes:

• SSHRC Standard Research Grant for "Gurus and the Making of Hindutva in Twentieth Century India"
• SSHRC Insight Grant (2015) for "The 'Lost' Mughal Pensioners of Banaras"
• Yale University's Agrarian Studies Fellowship
• Indian Institute of Advanced Study (Shimla) residency
• Nehru Memorial Museum research fellowship

External funding from Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has sustained her archival work across India while enabling mentorship of graduate researchers in historical methods. Current projects bridge legal history and religious studies to analyze how monastic property disputes become vehicles for political Hinduism, with future work prioritizing ascetic sexuality and family structures within guru lineages.