Sonakshi Grover

I am a DPhil student in International Development at the University of Oxford, building on an MPhil degree in the same field. My research engages with the anthropology of law, gender, and the family in contemporary India. During my MPhil, I conducted an ethnography of divorce and legal processes in Lucknow, North India, examining how cases—particularly those involving mental cruelty and maintenance—were constructed by litigants and lawyers, and how notions of justice, gendered subjectivity, and familial obligation were negotiated within everyday legal practice. I was awarded the Eugene Havas Memorial Prize for best overall performance in the MPhil.

I completed a BA in Economics at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. I have also published a curated repository of legal judgments on sexual justice in India for Mapping Sexuality, a project of Ashoka University’s Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

My current work sits at the intersection of legal anthropology, gender studies, and development scholarship, and is supported by the GUDTP ESRC studentship.

My doctoral research explores how legal professional identity, and everyday legal labour shape meanings of matrimonial conflict in contemporary India. Situated in Lucknow, the study traces divorce cases as they move through legal stages and registers, asking how legal actors translate lived experiences of marital breakdown into legal language and bureaucratic form.

The project interrogates the categories of work, law and divorce as sites in which gender, caste and middle-class identity are interpreted, contested and mobilised. It examines how legal processes may, in turn, reshape wider understandings of marriage, intimacy, justice and the State.