Born and brought up in India, Taanya is a researcher passionate about the subject of gender and women’s rights, among other development and welfare issues, especially in the context of South Asia. She has completed her M.A. and M. Phil in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, where her thesis focused on debates surrounding women’s agency and autonomy in patriarchal societies, and how democratic nation states navigate the competing questions of individual freedoms and group rights in a multicultural context.

She has volunteered with different NGOs promoting women’s rights and other welfare issues and was a teaching assistant for a postgraduate course on ‘Law and Politics in India’ at Ashoka University, New Delhi where she taught Young India Fellows. She has also worked as a Research Associate at the Centre for Policy Research where she was part of a two year long ethnographic study analysing the Delhi government’s education policies and reform efforts directed towards teaching at the right level. More recently, she worked as a consultant with the United Nations Population Fund on a qualitative sociological study studying shifts in parental attitudes towards daughters in India since the 1990s.

Currently, Taanya is also involved as a Research Assistant on the ESRC funded GendV project, based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, which explores urban transformations and changing gender relations in New Delhi and Johannesburg.