Niraja Gopal Jayal

Niraja Gopal Jayal is the Avantha Chair at the King’s India Institute at King’s College London. From 2019-2023 she was also Centennial Professor at The London School of Economics in the Department of Gender Studies. Prof. Jayal was a professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University prior to joining King’s College London in 2021.

Prof. Jayal’s areas of research include citizenship, democracy and welfare in India. Her published works include the book Citizenship and Its Discontents (2013), which won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015. Prof. Jayal’s other books include Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (1999); and Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions (2006). She has co-edited The Oxford Companion to Politics in India, and edited, among several others, Democracy in India (2001) and Re-Forming India: The Nation Today. (2019) Her most recent book is Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy (2021). She is the Co-Editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Constitution of India (forthcoming, 2025).

Niraja Jayal delivered the Radhakrishnan Memorial Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford in 2009, and was Vice-President of the American Political Science Association (2011-12). Prof. Jayal has held visiting appointments at Princeton University, King’s College, London, and the EHESS, Paris.