Devi Rathore

• E-mail: brsdevi@yahoo.com
• Department: Research Fellows

Prof. Dr. Shyamala Devi Bhukya Rathore, an independent social action research professor, the first woman from the Ghor community to become a professor in the former state of Andhra Pradesh, India, broke through significant barriers and challenged social norms. Her exceptional academic achievements earned her scholarships to India's top universities.

She graduated from Women's College, Koti, Hyderabad in 1975, and completed her M.A. in Economics at Osmania University, Hyderabad in 1977. She then started her research in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi as an ICSSR doctoral student and began her teaching career in 1979 in Government Women's College, Karimanagar and joined as a Lecturer in Kakatiya University in 1981.

Prof. Devi, was awarded her Ph.D. from JNU (1989), as a UGC Teacher Fellow, under the guidance of Prof. Utsa Patnaik. In 1992, when appointed as a Professor of Economics at Kakatiya University in Warangal, India, she became the youngest person in the state of Andhra Pradesh to achieve this position.

She has also been a recipient of National Overseas Fellowship by the Government of India (1995) following which she conducted a comparative study of Romani Groups ("Gypsy") and Ghor/Gaur ("Lambada", "Banjara") Communities across Europe and Telangana, India. Her work (including a documentary film "We Are Every Where") focuses on the cultural diversity and the nature of socio-economic discrimination faced by "Gypsy" Roma / Ghor/ Gaur ethnic groups all over the world from their early migrations onward.

Over the past 45 years Prof Devi has worked with and presented at many renowned institutions across the world. She has been a senior research fellow at the University of Greenwich in London, UK (1997) and the Centre for Asian Studies Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands (1995), a visiting professor at the Centre for Economic Studies, at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (2006) and an Honorary Professor at IISH (2017).

She has conducted workshops with her audiovisual material at the grassroot level both in Europe and in India. Prof. Devi's presentations are mostly based on empirical evidences and lived experiences supported with visual Economic-Anthropological-Ethnographic work. She is currently preserving her original research material to be archived at IISH.