Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural and intellectual historian of early India, specializing in working with Sanskrit texts. She is a professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has also been the Malathy Singh Distinguished Lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale University, USA, the Jan Gonda Fellow in Indology at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and DAAD Professor of History at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany. She has authored, edited, or translated seven books based on classical and vernacular Indian literature.