I am a historian of modern South Asia and of decolonization, and am Assistant Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in 2019. My research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of history, literature, political theory, and moral philosophy. At this point of time, the central problem that vexes me is that of the nation-state in South Asia, and my research examines the good and the bad (mainly the bad) of nationalism.

So is there a way out?

My book Bengal Undivided: Language and the Limits of Nationalism in South Asia (in progress) aims to provide a new account of the Hindu-Muslim relationship in South Asia through a renewed attention to the politics of language. Traditional accounts of this relationship frame it in terms of enmity and competing religious nationalisms culminating in the Partition of 1947. By focusing on Bengali as a shared language on which a shared sense of community could be forged, I uncover a hidden history of friendship and collaboration that helped to generate new possibilities across three nation-states (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) over the course of the twentieth century. The book is based on my dissertation Philology and the Politics of Language: The Case of Bengali, 1893-1955, which won the Sardar Patel Award, awarded by UCLA, for best doctoral dissertation on any aspect of modern India - social sciences, humanities, education and fine arts.

An article "From Fascism to Famine: Complicity, conscience, and the narrative of "peasant passivity" in Bengal, 1941-1945" is forthcoming in a special issue of Modern Asian Studies (World War II in South Asia). It examines how bourgeois intellectuals, associated with the Anti-Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Association, decentred the peasantry through their narrativization of the 1943 Bengal famine.

My essay "How to be Political without Being Polemical: The Debate between Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore over the Kṛṣṇacaritra" explores my interest in the long lives of Sanskrit epic literature. When two Bengalis fell out over the elusive figure of Krishna (philologically) in the 19th century, they symbolised two distinct modern approaches in thinking about the Mahābhārata––as history, and as literature. This essay is part of the anthology Many Mahabharatas, edited by Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai and published by SUNY Press in 2021.

Of the dead people I love and am inspired by, two are Italians (Piero Pasolini and Antonio Gramsci), and some are Bengali (this includes Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam.) Other than historical research, I am also interested in translation and in writing fiction.