Saumya Maheshwari

Her research focuses on inter-religious marriage-making in India. It explores how individuals in inter-religious pairings experience, navigate, and respond to dynamic legal and bureaucratic restraints, polarising political rhetoric, and familial opposition, in the process of formalizing their relationship into marrriage. 

Saumya’s research is based on ethnographic fieldwork with inter-religious couples, activists, lawyers, and other actors involved in the marriage-making process in the northern Indian cities of Delhi NCR, Jaipur, Lucknow, and Allahabad. Her work attends to the nature and form of everyday negotiations – with one’s family, partner, social workers, and with the state – involved in marrying across religious boundaries, the affective registers that animate these negotiations, and the relationship between the circulation of ideas about the law and perceptions of legality, risk, and uncertainty.  

Saumya’s doctoral research is supported by the Leverhulme-funded project 'The Social Life of Law in Authoritarian Contexts' at SOAS.  Saumya completed her undergraduate degree in law from the National Law School of India University in 2016. She began her legal career as a matrimonial disputes lawyer, later transitioning to research and advocacy at the intersections of law, gender, and sexuality, including on the criminalization of adolescent sexuality, sexual health and well-being, freedom from gender-based violence and gender-based discrimination in accessing health, work, and housing. 

She pursued an LLM in Law and Gender at SOAS with the support of the Felix Trust, graduating in 2021. Her thesis explored the relationship between gendered social reproductive labour and economic entitlements within marriage. Following her LLM, Saumya taught law at BML Munjal University in Gurgaon, India. 

• Family law
• Law and anthropology
• Identity and subjectivity
• Social reproduction
• Gendered labour