Rita Kothari is Professor of English and the Head of the Department of English at Ashoka University. She earned her MPhil and her PhD in Literary Studies and Translation from Gujarat University, Ahmedabad. She has previously taught at St. Xavier’s College (Ahmedabad), MICA (Ahmedabad), and the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar.

She is a multilingual scholar and translator whose work spans across different disciplines such as literature, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and history. Her questions emerge from observations of regions and communities in the western part of the Indian subcontinent—Gujarat, Kutch, and Sindh. Her ethnographic research on marginal communities—through religion, caste, occupation, and gender—focuses upon narratives of identity, raising questions of both linguistic and cultural translation.

Professor Kothari has translated extensively from Gujarati and Sindhi into English and occasionally vice versa. Her translations, as well as her edited volumes, have made significant contributions to the field of language politics and translation. Her latest book, Uneasy Translations: Self, Experience and Indian Literature, interweaves her personal journey as an academic into reflections around self, language, and translation—with an eye upon the intangibly available category of experience.

Her teaching interests include language politics, caste and communalism, Bollywood, Indian literature, translation studies, Partition, border studies, Gujarat studies, and Sindh studies. Movements across languages, contexts, and cultures form the fulcrum of her interests, making translation the prism through which she sees the Indian context.