Sujay Rao Mandavilli is an Anthropologist and researcher with major contributions to various fields of Anthropology and Social Sciences.
He is the son of an Indian Institute of Technology professor, and the intellectual climate he imbibed at the Indian Institute of Technology campus in Chennai and his experiences with different kinds of people right from an early age as well as in diverse professions later on in life, stood him in very good stead, by providing him with unique insights on different aspects of everyday life. Over the years, he has made major contributions to Anthropological Economics, the Sociology of Science, Theories of socio-cultural change, Identity theory, Historiography, Language dynamics, Indo-European studies, the Aryan Problem, the origin of Brahmi and the identity of the Harappans.His hypothesis is that most fields of social sciences are based on Eurocentric paradigms, and that better theories can only come from intellectual multipolarity and ethnographic data collected from different parts of the world, and an experiential knowledge of different cultures. Thus, people from diverse cultural backgrounds must participate in scientific endeavour in the social sciences. This applies to fields such as Economics, Sociology and Anthropology where concepts were developed based on European or American points of view, and often with a view to maintain their cultural hegemony.All this is inimical to the healthy growth of science