Rakesh K. Kaul

Rakesh K Kaul is the author of the bestseller The Last Queen of Kashmir published by Harper Collins and the critically acclaimed Dawn The Warrior Princess of Kashmir published by Penguin India.

His family hails from Kashmir. He migrated to the US in 1972 after becoming a gold medalist at IIT Delhi. On arrival, he won a national writing competition organized by a leading American newspaper. In addition to a distinguished business career he has written extensively for leading newspapers and magazines and been a keynote speaker on the history, politics and culture of Kashmir.

He has served as the Co-Chairman of The Arts of Kashmir Exhibition at the Asia Society in New York. He was a founding contributor to the first Chair of India Studies at University of California, Berkeley and to the Center for the Advanced Study of India at University of Pennsylvania as also the Mattoo Center for India Studies at State University of New York. He has an MBA from the University of Chicago where he was the Leon Carroll Marshall Fellow and an MS from Brown University.

A modern-day Questor he was instrumental in the recovery from the German government of the stolen Tengapura Durga, the oldest continuously worshipped Durga in the Asian sub-continent.