Please join the Johns Hopkins India Institute and Hopkins at Home for a panel discussion on the role of women in the legal profession and the legacies of socioeconomic inequality in India. Drawing from both literary and social science perspectives, the panel will feature JHU alumna and award-winning literary author, Sujatha Massey, and socio-legal scholar and critical feminist, Dr. Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen. In 2021, both Ms. Massey and Dr. Ballakrishnen released their books on women and law in India. Ms. Massey released the third installment of her Perveen Mistry Series, The Bombay Prince (Soho Crime Press), a historical fiction in which one of India’s first female lawyers investigates murders set in the riots during the Prince of Wales’ visit to India in the 1920s. Dr. Ballakrishnen published Accidental Feminism (Princeton University Press), which examines how gendered socialization and essentialism, family structures and dynamics, and firm and regulatory histories afford elite female lawyers in contemporary India more egalitarian outcomes than are available to their local and global peers. Dr. Rina Agarwala, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, will moderate the discussion. Dr. Agarwala’s work focuses on how vulnerable populations, particularly Indian informal workers and migrants, assert their rights through social movements.