Biography
Kartik Maini is a doctoral student at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago. He has B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from the University of Delhi. Maini works at the intersections of intellectual history, religious studies, and political thought. More concretely, he is interested in Sanskrit knowledge-systems and their polyvalent genealogies in colonial South Asia in general and its renunciant subcultures in particular. Questions of knowledge and alternative modernities, ascesis and its mediations of the political figure prominently in his work, opening into a longer and more diversely situated history of ethical meditation. Maini intends to work with literatures in Sanskrit, Hindi, Bangla, Punjabi, and French. His academic preoccupations beyond the circumscribed spaces of research include Hindustani classical music (especially, but not limited to, thumri and khayāl) and the social worlds of sound, Rāmakathā traditions, and queer theory.
Research Interests
Sanskrit knowledge-systems (Vedānta), modern intellectual history and postcolonialism, continental philosophy
Education
M.A., University of Delhi, 2020
B.A., St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, 2018