Yashaswini Chandra specialises in South Asian art and history, working across premodern and colonial periods. Her research interests include the arts and cultures of the Himalayas, Rajasthan and Mughal India combined with animal history and women’s studies. She is the author of The Tale of the Horse: A History of India on Horseback. It was published in South Asia by Pan Macmillan India under the Picador India imprint, 2021, and in the UK by Holland House Books, 2022. The South Asian edition of the book was listed among the ‘highlights of 2021’ in the category of Non-fiction: History by the Asian Review of Books, shortlisted for the JK Paper and The Times of India AutHer Award – Best Debut, 2022, and longlisted for the Karwaan Book Prize, 2022.

Her next book is intended as a women’s history of colonial spaces of India, to be published by Pan Macmillian and Pan Macmillian India under the Picador and Picador India imprints. Yashaswini aims to establish a link between the past that survives in archives, museums and historiography, that which is reformulated in popular imagination, and the past that exists as lived history in contemporary India.

She was an affiliated fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, guest faculty at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, as well as visiting faculty at Ashoka University, Sonipat. She also worked for Sahapedia, an open online resource on the arts, cultures and histories of India. On behalf of Sahapedia, she managed the multi-volume documentation of the Rashtrapati Bhavan (President’s House) in New Delhi and an institutional collaboration with Rupayan Sansthan in Jodhpur, Rajasthan. In connection with her work on the Rashtrapati Bhavan, she co-edited two volumes, Right of the Line: The President’s Bodyguard on the household cavalry of the Indian head of state and Life at Rashtrapati Bhavan tracing its transformation from a colonial stately home.