Meera Kosambi (24 April 1939 – 26 February 2015) was an Indian sociologist.

Biography

She was the younger daughter of the illustrious intellectual, historian, linguist, statistician and mathematician, D.D. Kosambi, and granddaughter of Acharya Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi, a Buddhist scholar and a Pāli language expert. Her mother's name was Nalini Kosambi (nee' Madgavkar). She received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Stockholm. She is the author of several books and articles on urban sociology and women's studies in India.

For nearly a decade she served as Director of the Research Centre for Women's Studies at the SNDT University for Women, Mumbai. She worked extensively on the 19th-century Indian feminist Pandita Ramabai, whose writings she compiled, edited and translated from Marathi.^[1] She has also translated and edited the autobiography and scholarly writings of her grandfather Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi.

Kosambi died in Pune on 26 February 2015 after a brief illness.^[2]

Works

• 1986 Bombay in Transition : The Growth and Social Ecology of a Colonial City, 1880-1980, Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell International
• 1994 Women's Oppression in the Public Gaze: an Analysis of Newspaper Coverage, State Action and Activist Response (edited), Bombay: Research Centre for Women’s Studies, S.N.D.T. Women’s University
• 1994 Urbanization and Urban Development in India, New Delhi: Indian Council of Social Science Research
• 1995 Pandita Ramabai’s Feminist and Christian Conversions : Focus on Stree Dharma-neeti, Bombay: Research Centre for Women’s Studies, S.N.D.T. Women’s University
• 1996 Women in Decision-Making in the Private Sector in India (with Divya Pandey and Veena Poonacha), Mumbai: Research Centre for Women’s Studies, S.N.D.T. Women’s University
• 2000 Intersections : Socio-Cultural Trends in Maharashtra (edited), New Delhi: Orient Longman, New Delhi
• 2000 Pandita Ramabai Through Her Own Words: Selected Works (translated, edited and compiled) New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press
• 2003 Pandita Ramabai's American Encounter : The Peoples of the United States (1889) (translated and edited), Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• 2007 Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History, Ranikhet: Permanent Black
• 2011 Nivedan: The Autobiography of Dharmanand Kosambi, trans. by Meera Kosambi. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
• 2012 Women Writing Gender (edited, translated and with an introduction), Ranikhet: Permanent Black, ISBN 978-8178243368
• 2013 Dharmanand Kosambi: The Essential Writings, ed. by Meera Kosambi. Orient Blackswan.