Anirudh Kanisetti

Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian specialising in the political, commercial, and cultural history of early medieval South India. He is the author of Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire (Juggernaut, 2025) and the award-winning Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas (Juggernaut, 2022). Drawing on epigraphy, art history, and literary material, his work reconstructs the shifting networks of kingship, trade, and religious patronage that shaped the Deccan and the Tamil country across half a millennium. His research has received support from Princeton University, the India Foundation for the Arts, and the Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru.
Kanisetti's broader scholarly practice spans institutional and editorial work. He served as Editor at the MAP Academy (now impART), where he contributed to the Encyclopedia of Art. He has also held fellowships at the Takshashila Institution and the Deccan Heritage Foundation. His awards include the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar (2023), the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman, and Tata Literature Live's Non-Fiction Book of the Year (2022).

A committed communicator of historical research, Kanisetti writes the Thinking Medieval column for ThePrint and hosts three podcasts — Echoes of India, YUDDHA: The Indian Military History Podcast, and The Altar of Time: A History of India's Christian Art. He has presented for the BBC and Arté. His work consistently foregrounds the material and epigraphic record to challenge colonial and nationalist framings of the subcontinent's past, making him a distinctive voice on the political and religious worlds of the Cholas and their contemporaries.