About me
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian specialising in the political, commercial, and cultural history of ancient and early medieval South India. He is the author of Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire (Juggernaut, 2025) and the award-winning Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas (Juggernaut, 2022). Drawing on epigraphy, art history, and literary sources, his work reconstructs the shifting networks of kingship, trade, and religious patronage that shaped the Deccan and the Coromandel Coast across half a millennium. His research has received support from Princeton University, the India Foundation for the Arts, and the Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru.
Kanisetti's broader scholarly practice spans institutional, authorial and editorial work. He served as Editor at the MAP Academy, where he contributed to the Encyclopedia of Indian Art, and he was formerly Honorary Fellow at the Deccan Heritage Foundation. He has also held a research fellowship at the Takshashila Institution. His awards include the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar (2023), the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman, and Tata Literature Live's Non-Fiction Book of the Year (2022).
A committed communicator of historical research, Kanisetti writes the Thinking Medieval column for ThePrint and hosts three podcasts — Echoes of India, YUDDHA: The Indian Military History Podcast, and The Altar of Time: A History of India's Christian Art. He has presented for the BBC, Arté, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative History. His work consistently foregrounds the material and epigraphic record to challenge north-Indian-centric and colonial-era framings of the subcontinent's past, making him a distinctive voice on the political and religious worlds of the Cholas, Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas and their contemporaries.
