Saraswati Raju

Saraswati Raju was born in 1949 in India. She studied geography at Jiwaji University in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, where she topped the Faculty of Social Sciences in her MA in Geography in 1971 and was awarded the university's gold medal. She completed her PhD at Jiwaji University in 1977.

From 1978 to 1981 she held a postdoctoral fellowship at Syracuse University in the United States, which brought her into conversation with Anglo-American human geography.

Raju joined the Centre for the Study of Regional Development (CSRD) at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where she taught social geography until 2016. She chaired the centre from 2005 to 2007, coordinated its Centre for Advanced Studies in Geography and was honorary director of JNU's Women's Studies Programme from 2008 to 2011.

When she began her work, gender was largely absent from Indian geography. With Deipica Bagchi she edited Women and Work in South Asia: Regional Patterns and Perspectives. In 1999 she published, with Peter J. Atkins, Naresh Kumar and Janet G. Townsend, The Atlas of Women and Men in India, which drew on the 1991 Census to map literacy, work, marriage, fertility, political power and India's missing girls and women, while openly examining how such data were built and the ethics of mapping them.

Her later research addressed the declining child sex ratio in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, gendered access to higher education, reproductive health services in Haryana, child labour, home based work and the segmentation of urban labour markets, and the relationship between development NGOs and the state in India and Ghana. She edited Gendered Geographies: Space and Place in South Asia (Oxford University Press, 2011), co-edited Doing Gender, Doing Geography with Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt (Routledge, 2011) and co-edited Women Workers in Urban India with Santosh Jatrana (Cambridge University Press, 2016). She also worked on a national Gender Atlas for India's Department of Science and Technology.

Internationally she was a founding member of the International Geographical Union's Commission on Gender and Geography, wrote the 2002 essay We Are Different, but Can We Talk? in Gender, Place and Culture, and served on editorial boards including Antipode, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Progress in Human Geography, Geoforum and the Indian Journal of Gender Studies. She was a Trevelyan Fellow at Durham University in 1992 and held visiting positions at Heidelberg, Ottawa, Carleton, Deakin and the Australian National University.

Raju kept her private life out of public view, and details of her family have not been reported. Colleagues remembered her rigour, quiet persistence and commitment to her students at JNU, many of whom went on to teach and research in India and abroad.

Saraswati Raju died on 10 November 2026 at the age of 76. The place and cause of death were not made public. On 12 November The Wire published a tribute by her former CSRD colleague Srinivas Goli of the International Institute for Population Sciences, describing her as one of the most original and courageous voices in Indian social sciences and gender studies.

Raju is credited with putting gender on the map of Indian geography and with arguing that counting is never neutral. In 2010 the Association of American Geographers made her the first recipient from outside the English speaking world of its Janice Monk Service Award, and in 2012 its Asian Geography Specialty Group gave her a Distinguished Service Award. The Atlas of Women and Men in India remains a reference point for feminist and population geography.