Mallika Kaur

Mallika Kaur is a lawyer and writer on gender and racial justice. The Harvard Kennedy School student review says she grew up in Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s, holds a Master in Public Policy from Harvard (2010) and a JD from UC Berkeley, and teaches at Berkeley Law. A book-club page lists her as co-founder and Acting Executive Director of the Sikh Family Center, which it calls the only Sikh American organisation focused on gender-based violence. She is a living person.

Her book. Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) covers the June 1984 army assault on Sikh gurdwaras and the armed conflict that followed. She avoids the army's codename for the assault as a sanitised, one-sided label. The book centres human rights defenders, many of them women, rather than treating women only as victims. One of its subjects is the human rights defender Baljit Kaur, who in 1985 left her job at Air France to devote herself to human rights work and took footage of the scorched countryside to Amnesty International in the United Kingdom and Asia Watch in the United States.

• 2020: the Sikh Research Journal published a book colloquium on the work, with four reflections and a response from her.

Known for: bringing legal training and gender analysis to the record of the Punjab conflict, and keeping the work of its human rights defenders in view.