Meenakshi Jain is an Indian political scientist and historian who served as an associate professor of history at Gargi College, Delhi. Her areas of research include cultural and religious developments in medieval and early modern India. In 2014, she was nominated as a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research by the Government of India. In 2020, she was conferred with the Padma Shri, India's fourth highest civilian award, for her work in the field of literature and education.
Jain wrote Sati: Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries, and the Changing Colonial Discourse on the practice of Sati in colonial India and had also authored a school history textbook, Medieval India, for NCERT, which replaced a previous textbook co-authored by Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra et al.
Meenakshi Jain was nominated to Rajya Sabha by President Droupadi Murmu on 12 July 2025.
Meenakshi Jain is the daughter of journalist Girilal Jain, a former editor of The Times of India. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Delhi. Her thesis on the social base and relations between caste and politics was published in 1991.
Jain is an associate professor of history at Gargi College, affiliated with the University of Delhi. In December 2014, she was nominated as a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research by the Indian government. She is former Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and currently Senior Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR).
Her books include, Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples, The Battle for Rama: Case of the Temple at Ayodhya and Rama and Ayodhya.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum noted Jain to be an amateur historian, who despite being trained as a sociologist, was inducted as a historian in service of a political mission. Her Medieval India rendered the time-span through a monoscopic clash-of-civilizations narrative between the forces of good (Hindus) and evil (Muslims); the tensions and internal conflicts between these seemingly homogeneous groups were done away with. Nonetheless, Nussbaum found her work to be a small "oasis of intelligence", subtlety and literacy, when contrasted with other publications of the new NCERT series, published under the aegis of the Hindu Nationalist government; Professor Pralay Kanungo of Jawaharlal Nehru University reflected similar sentiments.
Similarly, sociologist Nandini Sundar found Medieval India to have portrayed the exactions of the Sultanate rulers and the Mughals as anti-Hindu acts; besides, all of their contributions to the social, cultural and political were ignored. She saw this as part of a broader pattern of state-induced historical negationism to suit the need of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. John Stratton Hawley of Columbia University found the book to misrepresent the gensis of the Bhakti movement by presenting it as a response to Shankaracharya's monism than to the egalitarian message of Islam.
Pralay Kanungo found Jain's Rama and Ayodhya (2013) to be a subtle and sophisticated work that managed to stand apart from the earlier ahistorical propaganda by Hindutva-leaning historians. Nonetheless, while by cherry-picking from random sources, she had managed to produce a useful compilation, which can be traced in many islamic historian's book questioning distortion of history by post independence leftist historians.
In 2020, President Kovind awarded the Padma Shri for her contribution in the field of Literature and Education.