Mr. Mahishan Gnanaseharan is a burgeoning scholar whose primary research interests lie at the intersection of modern intellectual history, legal philosophy, international relations theory, and global histories of decolonization during the 20th century. He has worked and studied in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Mr. Gnanaseharan graduated from Princeton University in 2020 with a concentration in Political Theory and minors in South Asian Studies and African American Studies. At Princeton, Mr. Gnanaseharan was awarded a Streicker International Fellowship in 2019 to travel to New Delhi and collaborate with scholars at the Centre for Policy Research on research regarding liberalism and secularism in Indian jurisprudence. Mr. Gnanaseharan has also been credited for contributions to Princeton faculty research ranging from analyses of the role of slavery in the founding of the United States to assessments of major political treatises on colonialism, historic injustice, and empire.
Upon graduation, Mr. Gnanaseharan contributed for a brief time to multimillion-dollar litigation efforts as a paralegal at a New York City law firm. Shortly thereafter, he became an MSc candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics. Mr. Gnanaseharan’s postgraduate research has examined how the sizable migration of Tamil laborers from India to Ceylon in the early 20th century informed postcolonial conceptions of international borders and citizenship in South Asia.
Alongside from his research pursuits, Mr. Gnanaseharan is a passionate advocate for global human rights. He has raised concerns about violence against women and girls and the plight of refugees in South Asia before the United States Senate, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the House of Commons in the United Kingdom.
Mr. Gnanaseharan’s Fulbright-Nehru research project maps the political legacies of South India’s ‘Self-Respect’ Movement by highlighting founder E.V. Ramaswamy’s (or ‘Periyar’s’) underexplored intellectual relationships with, among others, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Using his fluency in Tamil, Mr. Gnanaseharan is analyzing the heretofore untranslated writings of Periyar to contextualize the Self-Respect Movement’s historical implications for religious pluralism, democratic politics, and Indian civic identity. Ultimately, this project has the potential to directly inform contemporary public discourse regarding political relationships between South Asian citizens of differing social backgrounds.