Second Thoughts x Kavitha Rao

Our conversation with Kavitha Rao looks at the writing of Indian history: the archives we inherit, the gaps within them, the distance between academic scholarship and popular history, and the difficulty of telling the past when so much of the evidence has already been lost. We talk about forgotten figures, magnificent failures, the stories that survive and those that don’t, and what happens when we begin looking beyond the familiar national narrative. Kavitha Rao is a writer, journalist and former lawyer, and the author of Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India’s First Women in Medicine and Spies, Lies and Allies: The Extraordinary Lives of Chatto and Roy. Her work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The New York Times, South China Morning Post and Quartz.