The National Law School of India University (NLSIU) hosted Prof. Lalitha Shivaswamy, (NLS BA LLB 1996), Adjunct Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, for a lecture titled “Local Self Government in New England: A case study of Connecticut.” The lecture took place on Friday, March 27, 2026, at 11 am at the Conference Room, Training Centre, NLSIU.

Abstract

Local Self Government in New England: A case study of Connecticut

This talk and the ensued discussion explored the concept of “Home Rule” as enshrined in the Constitution of the State of Connecticut; the origin of local authority, its historical evolution from the 1600’s to the present day, and the advantages and challenges in day-to-day government in ensuring transparency, checks and balances, and that power remains in the hands of the people.

In her service on both appointed and elected boards, Dr. Shivaswamy is uniquely positioned to discuss her experience of Home Rule in practice.

About the Speaker

Dr. Lalitha Shivaswamy is a native of Bengaluru and an alumna of NLSIU, BA LLB (Hons.) Class of 1996.

She migrated to Connecticut in 1999 with her husband who is also from Bengaluru. She comes from a family of legal scholars, including her grandfather Shri A. R. Somnath Iyer, former Chief Justice of the Mysore High Court, and her father Shri. S Shivaswamy, Advocate. She is the daughter-in-law of Dr. S. Krishnamurthy, IPS (retd.) who was the first LLD recipient from NLSIU in 1992.

Dr. Shivaswamy is the CEO of People First Technologies, an AI platform focussed on employee engagement, and President of Helios Management, a boutique advisory firm. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Previously, she was a venture lending portfolio manager at Horizon Technology Finance and a private placement analyst at Citigroup Global Investments. She was recently elected to public office in the town of Simsbury to serve a six-year term on the Board of Finance, where she is Vice-Chair. She was also appointed as a commissioner on her town’s Charter Revision Commission. Dr. Shivaswamy is an ardent supporter of the choral and performing arts and has successfully demonstrated the power of the arts to engage and unite communities. She recently completed three terms as president of the Board of Governors Hartford Chorale, the region’s principal symphonic chorus. She is currently on the senior leadership team of the Board of Directors of The Hartford Symphony Orchestra, and Board Chair of Choral Arts of New England.

Dr. Shivaswamy obtained an SJD with honors, and an LLM from the University of Connecticut School of Law. She also has an MBA in finance from the University of Connecticut School of Business. She is enrolled in the Connecticut bar and was previously enrolled with the Bar Council of India.

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The Library Committee at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru is introducing a series of events surrounding the theme “Ethics & Texts”. The first of these will focus on “Ethics & Epics,” and Dr. Arshia Sattar will discuss the topic ‘Dharma and the Law’. Dr. Sattar will consider ideas of dharma as they are presented in the Hindu epics, most especially in Valmiki’s Ramayana, and explore how such classical understandings might be relevant to our times.

The talk will take place from 5:15 pm and is open to the public subject to prior registration.

About the Speaker

Dr. Arshia Sattar is a translator and writer and holds a PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilisations from the University of Chicago. Dr. Sattar has worked with the Valmiki Ramayana for over 30 years and is particularly interested in the epics and storytelling traditions of the Indian sub-continent.

She teaches and writes about classical Indian literature in India and abroad. She has several publications, most notably an abridged translation of the Valmiki Ramayana which has remained in print since 1996. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in Residence at Hampshire College in the U.S. and a Rockefeller Fellow at the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio. Her Mahabharata for Children was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Prize for Children’s Literature in 2022. In 2023, she was conferred the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government for her outstanding contribution to literature.

The Library Committee at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru is organising a Book Talk on “A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras,” authored by Dr. Kalpana Karunakaran and published by Westland Books in 2025.

The talk will take place from 5:15 pm and is open to the public subject to prior registration.

Panellists:

• Dr. Kalpana Karunakaran, Associate Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Madras
• Dr. Sudheesh R C, Assistant Professor, Social Science, NLSIU

About the book

A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras is an intimate, yet simultaneously anthropological, exploration of the life of Dr. Karunakaran’s maternal grandmother, Pankajam (1911–2007). The book captures the singularity of an exceptional woman, even as it situates her in a social universe shaped by the conventions of Tamil Brahmin orthodoxy. Dr. Karunakaran conveys with clarity how the ‘utterly ordinary’ life of a ‘woman of no consequence’ (as Pankajam writes of herself), lived out largely within the confines of family and kin, was quite far from ordinary.

The book draws extensively upon letters, glimpses of Pankajam’s life narrated through her thinly-disguised semi-autobiographical short stories that allowed her to ‘say the unsayable’ about love, intimacy and conjugality, and her autobiography, which she began writing in 1949 and kept writing till her last piece in 1995. What comes together is a riveting portrait of heartbreak and violence, yearning and delight, a housewife’s quest for intellectual growth and her talent for friendships across cultures and continents.

In the final reckoning, A Woman of No Consequence is about the chequered trajectories of a newly-born nation as seen through the lens of its daughters – restless women forcing home and nation to reckon with their stubborn striving for self-actualisation.

About the author

Dr. Kalpana Karunakaran is an Associate Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Madras. Her research and writings are in the intersecting fields of gender, poverty, microcredit, women’s work in the informal sector, women’s trade unions and collective action in solidarity-based movements. A bilingual public speaker and writer in Tamil and English, Dr. Karunakaran conducts workshops and participates actively in campaigns for gender equality, labour rights and human rights organized by women’s movements, trade unions and rural development NGOs in Tamil Nadu. She also writes on women’s lives with a focus on the intersections between the personal and the political. She is the author of Women, Microfinance and the State in Neo-liberal India (Routledge 2017) and the Tamil memoir, Comrade Amma: Magal Parvaiyil Mythily Sivaraman (Comrade Mother: A Daughter’s Portrait of Mythily Sivaraman), published in 2018.

 

The National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, will host a two–day, closed-door discussion on “Public Interest Litigation from a Comparative Perspective: Legitimacy of Judicial Lawmaking,” on March 28–29, 2026 at the University campus. The discussion is being organised in collaboration with colleagues from the universities of Tilburg and Utrecht, the Netherlands.

This discussion forms part of a broader comparative research initiative examining how courts across jurisdictions engage with questions of legitimacy in public interest litigation (PIL), particularly in cases that raise complex issues at the intersection of law, governance, and public policy. The project brings together insights from multiple jurisdictions, including India, South Africa, the United States, and the Netherlands, and seeks to better understand how courts justify and construct their authority in such cases. The closed-door meeting focusses on India as an important case study because of its distinctive experiences with PILs.

The discussion will convene a select group of judges, legal practitioners, academics, and researchers to engage in focussed discussions on these themes. Deliberations will centre on key dimensions of judicial legitimacy in PILs, including questions of access to courts, judicial reasoning and fact-finding practices, and the design and impact of remedies.

As a closed-door discussion, participation is by invitation only. The format is designed to facilitate in-depth and candid exchanges among participants, contributing to an ongoing research effort and fostering collaborative academic engagement.

The discussions are expected to inform future research outputs, including comparative scholarship and potential policy-relevant insights on judicial lawmaking in public interest cases.

The Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection, and Activism (QAMRA), at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru is hosting a lecture by Dr. Shannon Philip, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge. Titled “Grindr Wars: Neoliberalism and the Postcolonial Queer Subject in India,” the lecture will take place on Thursday, April 2, 2026, at 5 pm at the Conference Room, Training Centre, NLSIU.

The lecture is open to the public. Please register to attend.

Abstract

Grindr Wars: Neoliberalism and the Postcolonial Queer Subject in India

The rapid digitalisation, neo-liberalisation, and globalisation in India are profoundly transforming sexual identities and sexual politics. In particular, dating apps like Grindr are changing the ways in which young gay men’s identities and relationships are formed, mediated, and embodied. In this talk, Dr. Shannon Philip ethnographically explores the ways in which Grindr offers much needed visibility to young middle-class gay men in India where powerful heteropatriarchies marginalise their sexualities and masculinities. Yet at the same time, the inequality that marks this digital and neoliberal expansion means that gay dating applications like Grindr also reproduce these very inequalities of caste and class.

He reveals in particular the growing commodification of gay identities and sexualities that is mediated through digital platforms, producing a hierarchy between ‘classy gays’ and ‘poor gays’. Desire itself becomes commodified wherein ‘poor gays’ are not desirable bodies or identities and the performance of class and consumption becomes central to claims of sexual desirability. Grindr’s geolocating technology allows middle-class gay men to discriminate against ‘poor gays’ through the spatial and urban inequalities of cities like Delhi and Kochi, further amplifying the inequalities of caste and class. In this context, ‘Grindr Wars’ take place, which reveal the social and symbolic tensions, clashes, and violences that shape queer life in India today.

About the Speaker

Dr. Shannon Philip is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. He is also a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His first book titled ‘Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony‘ was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.