Shylashri Shankar is a senior fellow at CPR. Her intellectual and research interests include constitutionalism and religious freedom, ‘activism’ and policy making by the judiciary, impact of anti-terror laws on civil liberties, conceptual history and migration of ideas between judiciaries, urbanisation and old cities, and the political economy of anti-poverty initiatives. She is currently working on an urban ethnography of a sixteenth-century neighbourhood in Hyderabad.
She is the author of Scaling Justice: India’s Supreme Court, Anti-Terror Laws and Social Rights and co-author (with Raghav Gaiha) of Battling Corruption: Has NREGA Reached India’s Rural Poor. She has also written on judicial activism in India and Sri Lanka, transformative courts in the Global South, cross-judicial engagement on secularism in India, Sri Lanka and South Africa, ethnic conflict in South Asia and the Middle East, and on the politics and impact of anti-poverty programs.
She has held academic positions at the University of Texas at Austin and the Center on Religion and Democracy at the University of Virginia. In June 2011, she was a Bellagio Fellow at the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio, Italy.
Shylashri has a PhD from Columbia University, an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MA from the University of Cambridge, and a BA from Delhi University.
After a warm welcome by the anchor, Dr Shakti asks Ms Shylashri about how she came up with the name Turmeric Nation and why she barely talked about turmeric in the book. Ms Shylashri explains that she was looking for a name that represents the entire nation from past to present and is also a defining factor in so many things. That’s how she came up with the idea to name it Turmeric Nation, as turmeric is present in the food across India and was also used by a number of civilizations in the past. As the conversation moves ahead, Ms Shylashri talks about how food defines diversity as well as the culture of India. As geography, religion and culture change with every passing mile on the road, so does the cuisine in unimaginable ways. Ms Shylashri comes up with the example of Khichdi which is cooked in millions of ways across the country but its definition is bringing up a lot of ingredients to make something that’s not only easy to cook but also tastes good. As the conversation on India’s food comes to a conclusion, the session comes to a close.