Anshu Malhotra is Professor and Kundan Kaur Kapany Chair in Sikh and Punjab Studies in the Department of Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. She was formerly with the Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi. She holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London.
She works on gender studies, histories of religious and caste identities, cultural studies, and autobiography studies. She is currently engaged in studying the Punjabis of Delhi and their identity formations in the post-Partition period, as also the impact of the events of 1984 on their lives. She also has an on-going interest in looking at the Punjabi Dalit communities in California. The pluralistic and fluid religiosities of pre-colonial and early colonial Punjab are also of interest to her.
She is the author of Piro and the Gulabdasis: Gender, Sect and Society in Punjab (OUP, 2017) and Gender, Caste and Religious Identities: Restructuring Class in Colonial Punjab (OUP, 2002). She has co-edited Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture and Practice (OUP, 2012); Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia (Duke University Press, 2015; South Asian Print Zubaan, 2017); Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India (OUP, 2018); Bhai Vir Singh (1872-1957): Religious and Literary Modernities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Indian Punjab (Routledge, 2023); and edited Punjabi Centuries: Tracing Histories of Punjab (Orient BlackSwan, 2024). She is also a co-editor of the Brill’s Encyclopedia of Sikhism, V.2 (Brill, 2025). She is one of the editors of the Cambridge University Press’s South Asian Intellectual History Series.