Born on October 27, 1950 in Leningrad. In 1968 she finished Secondary School No. 185 in Leningrad with a Gold medal and was admitted to the Leningrad State University (Faculty of Oriental Studies, Department of Indian philology). In 1973 she graduated from the University with Honours (specialization: Oriental philology) and started working as an assistant at the same Department. In 1986 she successfully defended her Candidate of Sciences in Philology thesis titled “Pronominal clitics in Indo-Iranian languages” [Местоименные клитики в индоиранских языках] under supervision of Professor M.N. Bogolyubov, Corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Academician since 1990). In 1988 she completed a 10-month fellowship program at the Central Institute of Hindi in Delhi, India. In 1997 she became the Head of the Department of Indian philology at the Saint-Petersburg State University and in 1999 was appointed as Associate Professor. She taught Hindi, Urdu, courses in literature and theoretical grammar of these languages, led special seminars and, since 1987, also a course in comparative-historical grammar of Indo-Aryan languages.

Between 2001 and 2015 she conducted many field research trips in India, mostly in Bundelkhand. In 2011 she taught at the University of Lahore (Pakistan). In 2016‒2018 she taught and did research at the Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University (Wardha, Maharashtra) as a recipient of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations Scholarship. Since 2022 she has been working as a Senior Researcher at the IOM, RAS.

Main research topics: comparative-historical and descriptive grammar of Indo-Aryan languages, including the Parya language, and also vocabulary of argot-speaking groups in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan; local Hindu cults in India.

Awards: “For teaching Hindi” by the Aksharam organization associated with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (Delhi, India, 2009); “Hindi-sevi” (for service to Hindi) by the Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University (India, 2017).

Publications