Srikar Raghavan is an independent writer and researcher who grew up in Mysore. His first degree was in engineering, before he decided to switch to the humanities, where he has remained. He is a recipient of a New India Foundation fellowship.
Rama, Bhima, Soma emerged from his fascination with a completely undocumented space in Karnataka – the last three decades of the twentieth century – which saw a kaleidoscopic jumble of social movements born out of a society in churn. This moment had, he writes, “an unprecedented cultural efflorescence, when writers were socially and politically vociferous, with a passion that hasn’t been witnessed since.” Rama, Bhima, Soma is a work that fuses journalism, literary history, and social history in nuanced, non-chronological ways to capture the transition of a society animated by a quest for equality and justice, down to the seemingly sated neo-liberal times of today. It will be published by Westland-Pratilipi.
Srikar Raghavan loves playing the guitar, enjoys hunting down obscure books, and is presently based in Manipal.