Ranjana Kumari

Ranjana Kumari is an Indian social activist, writer, and academic. She is the director of the Centre for Social Research in Delhi and chairwoman of Women Power Connect, a national organization of women's groups.

Kumari was raised in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, in the Kashi Vidyapeeth compound. She was born to her mother Chandravati Sharma and father Jayanath, who manufactured banarasi saris. She is the second of their six children and their eldest daughter. Her grandfather Pandit Vishwanath Sharma was a founder of Kashi Vidyapeeth, and she has described her family as "very Gandhian". Most of her childhood friends became married, often through arrangements by their parents, by the time their 12th year of school was completed.

After she completed her primary education at Central Hindu Girls School, she resisted pressure from her grandmother and other family members to attend a women's college and instead enrolled in Banaras Hindu University (BHU). She studied political science, psychology, and economics at BHU and graduated in 1974, then moved to Delhi and completed her post-graduate and doctorate degrees in political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her PhD thesis studied power structures of the Panchayati raj political system, with a focus on the role of women.