Mukulika Banerjee

Professor Mukulika Banerjee is a leading academic in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE). She specializes in political anthropology with a focus on South Asia, particularly India and Pakistan. Her research explores democracy, citizenship, electoral cultures, and identity politics. She holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford and has been at LSE since 2009.

Her major works include Cultivating Democracy (2021), analyzing rural Indian democracy, and Why India Votes? (2014), examining voter behavior. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on topics like the Khudai Khidmatgars movement in Pakistan and the cultural significance of the sari in South Asia.

Banerjee has secured significant grants, including from ESRC, Leverhulme, and British Academy. Her current project, EECURI, studies electoral changes in urban and rural India. She is also a sought-after commentator on South Asian politics, appearing in media like BBC Radio and documentaries.

Awards include the Leverhulme Fellowship (2003-04) and ESRC grants for election-related research. Her interdisciplinary approach bridges anthropology with political science, emphasizing ethnography to understand societal dynamics.