Leela Khanna

Research interests: South Asia; right wing nationalism; political anthropology; caste theory; theories of social hierarchy; gender and sexuality.

Bio: I am a political anthropologist of India with a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from New York University. I was a 2025-2026 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Weatherhead Scholars Program. 

Research summary: I am currently writing my first book, an ethnography based on a decade of research and fieldwork of India’s principal right wing organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. In the past decade, the RSS has successfully diversified from a small movement consisting of urban, upper caste men and women to now attracting highly diverse rural, lower caste communities. The Students of Hindu Nationalism explicates the disagreements that emerged within RSS’s university wing as the transformations in its membership base brought into the movement an influx of diverse caste perspectives. This book traces how a new generation of educated Hindu nationalist men and women raised fundamental questions about caste identity, and how unexpectedly, rather than repressing this criticality, the RSS responded by reimagining its caste consciousness. By examining this process, my book challenges conventional political theories of how right wing movements negotiate minority-majority relations. Neither repressing dissent nor appeasing minorities, the new right wing is retheorizing the very concept of social hierarchy, entering a terrain of debate once occupied by scholars and the left wing.

This information is accurate as of the affiliate year indicated. (last updated 09.01.2026)