School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am a political and legal anthropologist and my work explores the relationship between law, violence and justice in the context of far-right politics. 

Before coming to Edinburgh, I was a postdoctoral fellow in global governance at McGill University, Montreal and an Assistant Professor at the School of Policy and Governance at Azim Premji University in Bangalore, India. I finished my PhD in Anthropology at Emory University after my Master's and M.Phil in Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics and undergraduate studies in English Literature in Delhi University. In sum, I have studied and taught in universities in USA, Canada, India and now in Scotland. 

My book Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities (Duke University Press, 2023) examines how political violence against minorities acts as a catalyst for radical changes in law, public culture, and statecraft. In terms of method, my book explores modes of writing and reading violence at a time of rising authoritarian politics and anti-minority violence in India and beyond. 

Over the last decade, I have written about the relationship between crowds and power, impunity and state formation, and the law and supremacist regimes as part of a broader effort to grasp the role of violence within liberal democracies.

One strand of my current research looks at the everyday life of far-right supremacist regimes, including the life stories of men who join far-right organisations, the dead-ends and limits of far-right politics, the creation of muscular, religious publics, and the relationship between authoritarian rule and public religiosity. A second, related, thread that runs through this work explores the relationship between aesthetics and politics, with a focus on the circulation, consumption, and co-production of media under authoritarian regimes. 

Teaching 

I teach on a number of UG/PGT core courses including 

• Empires
• Culture and Power
• Anthropological Theory

I am currently the Co-director of the Center for South Asian Studies and teach two UG/PG courses - South Asia (Culture, politics and economy); South Asia in the World. 

My current dissertation students are working on K-media in Chennai; electricity infrastructures in Assam; vernacular secularism in Kerala; caste inside higher education institutions in Maharashtra; and women and Hindu nationalism in Pune.