Prof. Trisha Gupta

Prof. Trisha Gupta is an independent writer and critic with over seventeen years of experience in the media.

After full-time stints at Time Out Delhi, Tehelka and the literary journal Biblio, she turned freelance in 2010. She has helped launch a city magazine, copy-edited senior academics and first-time fiction-writers, and been Associate Editor of the bilingual literary journal Pratilipi.in. She has been a columnist for the Sunday Guardian, the Hindu Business Line and The Voice of Fashion. For the last seven years, she has written a weekly column on cinema for the Mumbai Mirror (now called TOI Plus in its digital avatar).

She writes for a wide range of publications, including Scroll, The Caravan, Mint Lounge, India Today and Nat Geo Traveller, among many others. Her body of work includes reviews, features, op-eds, interviews, profiles and critical essays, and ranges from longform writing to short pieces. While closely following developments in cinema and literature, she also writes about theatre, photography, art, architecture, heritage and habitat conservation, and the class-, caste- and gender-based politics of urban life in India.

Her academic grounding is in history and socio-cultural anthropology. After a B.A. (Hons.) in history from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, she received an M.A. in anthropology from the University of Cambridge, followed by an M.Phil in anthropology from Columbia University in 2008.

Her recent essay on Khajuraho was published in the widely reviewed anthology Where the Gods Dwell: Thirteen Temples and Their (Hi)Stories (Westland 2021).

She is working on her first non-fiction book project, which will combine her historical and anthropological training with her abiding interest in popular culture.

As Professor of Practice at the Jindal School of Journalism and Communication, she currently teaches two writing courses — Writing III, which introduces students to literary forms and genres beyond journalism, and Writing VI, in which students acquire the skills they need for three staple forms of print journalism: interviews, opinion pieces and essays.