Tejaswini Niranjana (born 26 July, 1958) is an Indian professor, cultural theorist, translator, and author.
In 2021, Tejaswini Niranjana was awarded the American Literary Translators Association Prize for Prose Fiction Translation for No Presents Please, a translation of author Jayant Kaikini‘s short stories centered around the city of Mumbai. In 2019, No Presents Please was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2018, which Niranjana shared jointly with Jayant Kaikini.
She is the recipient of the 2018 Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship, Research Grants Council, Hong Kong. Niranjana was also awarded the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award for Best Translation of 1994.
Her theory of the relationship between colonialism and translation, writings on feminism and the ‘culture question’ in India, and her practice-based research into music (specifically Caribbean music, Hindustani classical music, and India-China collaborations) have contributed greatly to the fields of culture studies, gender studies, translation, and ethnomusicology. Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, 1992), Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, 2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai (2019) are some of her published books.
Niranjana was the co-founder and a senior fellow at the Centre for Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, where she was also the Lead Researcher in the HEIRA Program. During 2012-16, she headed the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and was an Indian-language advisor to Wikipedia.
Currently, Niranjana serves as the Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research; and as Dean of Online Programmes, Ahmedabad University.