Founded in 2005, Chaitanya is a small Chennai-based consultancy specialising in research and academic programming on political and policy issues relating to gender, international relations and security broadly defined.

Swarna Rajagopalan is the founder and Director of Chaitanya. Her team projects are carried out under the Chaitanya rubric and she has a considerable portfolio of research, consultancy, writing and teaching to her individual credit. From 2006 to 2025, she was the Managing Trustee of The Prajnya Trust, which she founded and select Prajnya programmes have now been transferred to the Chaitanya platform. Swarna Rajagopalan's consultancy portfolio has been diverse, both in terms of clients and the nature of the projects she has undertaken.

The team, 2005-2025

Apart from Dr. Swarna Rajagopalan, Subhashini Selvanathan was part of the Chaitanya team as administrator from April 2006 to May 2014. N. Santha has been part-time administrator since 2014.

Individuals who have interned or worked at Chaitanya include:

• Rachel Shubert
• Nandhini Parthib
• Gokul Chandrasekar
• Hemant Shivakumar
• Michelle James
• Vignesh Rajendran
• Malavika Ravi
• Niroopini Muralidharan
• Suhasini Udayakumar
• Uditi Lunawat, RC07 Intern

ACR Sudaroli, Sandhya Srinivasan S. and Anu Aroon were part of the "Surviving Violence" project team for Tamil Nadu.

Sita Umamaheswaran helped with logistics in the first year of the MSU-Chaitanya summer programme and Anjale Stephanos was full-time Logistical Coordinator in the second year.