On leave AY 2024-25
I am an anthropologist interested in questions of citizenship, secularism, and sexuality in South Asia. Currently, I am working on two projects. The first one is a book project which draws on ethnographic and archival research in lower riparian Sindh which argues that women's sexuality and role in sustaining kinship hold the key to understanding how religious others become transformed into minority citizens. The book centers Hindu and Dalit women's domesticity, desires, and relationships as a critical vantage point to view the secularized logics of governing identity and marginalization in Muslim majority Pakistan.
My second project is concerned with the struggle for caste emancipation in Pakistan. Although the government invisibilizes caste as an axis of inequality, anti-caste progressives make claims that can destabilize the existing majoritarian framework of the Pakistani state. In a series of articles, I ask how categories of social analysis around caste and religion are produced and contested, and how people imagine alternative political possibilities from marginalized positions. Writing from this project has appeared in American Ethnologist, South Asia, and Journal of Sindhi Studies.
I am also affiliated with the Gender and Sexuality Studies minor and the Mahbub-ul-Haq Research Center. I hold a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University (2021), MA from the University of Chicago (2012), and a BA from LUMS (2011).
My office hours in Fall 2023 are by appointment (send me a sign-up email). In AY 2023-24, I am teaching the following courses:
ANTH 244 Political Anthropology
ANTH 320 Qualitative Research Methods
ANTH 452/GSS 413 Sacred Femininities
"Jogendranath Mandal and the Politics of Dalit Recognition in Pakistan," South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 43:1, 119-135 (2020)
"Wonders Within Domestic Encounters: Three Women from Elias Khwabnama," Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 25:4, 594-610 (2024)
""So That We May Be Counted": Caste, Religion, and Untimely Numbers in Pakistan s National Census," American Ethnologist 51:3, 363-375 (2024)
"Entangled Impurities in Contemporary Sindh: Some Evidence from Law and Bureaucracy," Journal of Sindhi Studies 3:1, e1-e25 (2023)
With Natasha Raheja. "Unwelcome Guests and Hostages: Minority Claims on the State," Political and Legal Anthropology Review Online. (2020)
"Corruption, Friendship, and Women s Bodies: Exchanges with SherAli Tareen," ReOrient: Journal of Critical Muslim Studies 9:2, 384-387 (2025)
"Psychic Borders, Enforced Disappearances, and Everyday Life: Book Review of Ather Zia s Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women s Activism in Kashmir (University of Washington Press 2019)," Political and Legal Anthropology Review 43:1 (2020)
"Everyday Religiosity and Gendered Public Space," Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Spring Issue) (2025)
With Natasha Raheja. "Pakistani Politicians as Hindu Gods: The Visual Excesses of a Religious National Imaginary," POLAR Emergent Conversations: The Aesthetic Politics of Far-Right Movements (2023)
"Learning to Sew with Religious Others," Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Tampa FL (online) (2024)
"Knots in the Weave," Encounters of Difference Workshop (MEUS), University College London, UK (online) (2024)
"Deferring Jurisdiction: Pakistani Hindu Families in the Eyes of Which Law?" Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Baltimore MD (online) (2021)
"Three Women from Elias Khwabnama," Symposium on New Approaches to Bangladesh Studies, Annual South Asia Conference, Madison WI (2023)
"Conversion Between Religion and Desire: Thinking the Indeterminate Other in Pakistan" AES/APLA Annual Conference, Princeton NJ (2023)
"Jogendranath Mandal and the Politics of Dalit Recognition in Pakistan," South Asian Muslim Studies Association Symposium, Annual South Asia Conference, Madison, WI (2019)
"Ritual Boundaries and the Feminine Peril of Mutual Corruption," Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, San Diego CA (2024)
"Hindu Darshan, Muslim Ritual, and the Web of Everyday Life," Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Honolulu HI (online) (2022)
"Waiting for the Flood," Annual South Asia Conference, Madison WI (online) (2025)
"Counting to Save Sindh: Infelicitous Identities in the 2017 National Census," Sindh ECR Workshop, Center of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, UK (online) (2021)
"God, Saint, Policeman: Jhoolelal Across Time and Space," Roundtable on Forms of Policing in South Asia, Annual South Asia Conference, Madison, WI (2019)