I’m a Cultural Anthropologist of South Asia with Bachelors in Sociology, Masters and Cphil from UC San Diego where I wrote and defended my qualifying exams on “secularism and genealogy of modern nation state and religion” 2022—2024. I’m trained in Intellectual History, Anthropology of Islam and Political theory. From 2021 to 2024, I was Co-Investigator on a large network grant on 'Muslims in a time of Hindu majoritarianism' funded by the Henry Luce Foundation (PIs Christophe Jaffrelot and Bernard Haykel, Manan Ahmed) in Collaboration with Princeton, Sciences Po and Columbia University.I led the Kashmir cluster with six team members across India to further investigate Kashmiri Muslims' spatial politics through a multi-sited and ethnography of resistance, adaptation and co-option. I have also worked in Jamia Millia Islamia under Prof. Farida Khan new Delhi as Junior research fellow, and Coventry university as Research fellow with Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University, England.
My overarching aim is to engage with study of Kashmiri Muslims as a minority in South Asia, which has long been caught in right wing Hindutva ideological readings, interpretations and a partition- or at least violence, and trauma-centric perspective, to the same level of conceptual understanding as well as, crucially, methodological sophistication that characterizes the study of non-Muslim sociality. In the long run, studying how Kashmiri Muslims navigate their social, and political changes that are embedded within the law, power and new forms of disciplinary constellations under the rubric of military occupation in a secular democracy though one sliding steadily into majoritarian rule—should also help to rebut persistent claims of Muslim exceptionalism in global academic as well as popular discourse. In doing that, I draw my insights from Anthropology, Islamic studies, Intellectual history to open the possibilities for understanding the oriental subjects in their own perspective by situating their positionality within the forms of knowledge that we export to the academic industry while being sensitive, and careful to the translations, and writings about these subjects without distorting their sense of time, space and culture which is embedded within a variety of experiences, and their moralities. I combine both ethnography, textual analysis, and archival research together to understand the truth without detaching its ontology from the power relations.
CURRENT PROJECT IN MAKING
At the University of Virginia, my current project traces the connections between the modernity, religion, and the formation of secular within the postcolonial societies. I’m examining the intellectual, and religious traditions of Kashmiri Muslims whose critical engagement with doctrine of Indian secular thought marks a crucial turn at the beginning of 20th century to grapple with the limits of modern nation states and the pitfalls of secularism that formed the bases of its moral habitation. Understanding these disparate, conflicting genealogies of political thought requires one to place the sovereignty of Kashmiri Muslims within the distinctive conceptual history, the one which is attuned to vernacular genealogy and subsequently, exceeds the way sovereignty came to define the minority question in the arc of Global history. Thus, nodes of modernity, and the secularism became two crucial non linear shifts which came to define what Charles Taylor calls “Modern identity” in unique ways and its imperative to recuperate, unmoor and grasp the voices of marginal subjects by examining their authority from a unique moral standpoint of Islamic tradition within such transitions. I’m particularly interested in tracing the grammar of secular, its genealogy within within the postcolonial nation-states, the discourses through which it has consolidated disciplinary power, and the cultural logics it shares with the language of imperialism.
The second strand of my research engages the genealogy of three intellectual traditions within Islam—namely, Islamic revivalist movements in Kashmir and examines how these movements established their prominence through the reception, circulation, and translation of Islamic traditions. Instead of examine these critical engagement as timeless snippets which are often assumed to sustain the ritualistic sense of religious belonging, I place them with the larger moral, intellectual and political project that undergirds the versatility of tradition in sustaining itself within the destructive forces of modernity and the competing visions of modern sovereignty which relegated certain populations outside the purview of modern secular identity. I ask, what makes it possible for different movements, and the social actors within those movements to think about the questions of loss, community, tradition and critique to wrestle with the new forms of disciplinary modes of power, and the law of modern empire.
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Religion and Secularism, Islamic Traditions, Political Theory, South Asia, Colonialism, Sovergnity.
I now engage with episteme’s that revolve around three disciplinary axes: critical theory , social theory and Islamic studies, which are also the traditions which most directly situate my research on Kashmir. I have made “discursive tradition” as the locus of my study because the way it steers the orientation of body towards certain forms of truth which also enforces power relations by transforming bodies into ethical subjects. I’m both indebted to Alasdair Macintyre and Muhammad Asad whose work have become a source inspiration for me to think with the questions of time, tradition and authority in history. More broadly, I explore the questions of embodiment, intimacy, secular, and agency within the non-western theory, and western political thought, and what can we learn from the intellectual traditions of non-western philosophical antecedents that have been ignored within the western epistemology particularly which provided a robust foundation to the European intellectual history at the dawn of enlightenment.
With regards to the former, I engage primarily with questions of legal and political theory, although my interest grew in exposing the paradoxes, and contradictions in the secular logic that inform our conception of modern state, which has also led me down the path of literary theory, Religious studies, and Anthropology. As for the "study of Islam," my interest is in developing creative, nuanced and critical interpretations of Islamic political thought through the slow, meticulous reading of a wide range of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, Kashmiri texts, which touch on subjects as diverse (or perhaps not so diverse) as history, politics, law, aesthetics, and philosophy. Thus, my primary concern remains to understand the different forms of social and cultural life which sprang from the interpretations of Islamic discourses that redefined the sphere of politics, society and culture in Modern Kashmir. In doing that, I’m attuned to sketch alternative epistemologies that thrive, and sustain on the subterranean thought process of Islamic scriptures which helped Kashmiri Muslims to reimagine the notions of moral justice, enabled them to forge new political sensibilities, and assert unique concepts of Sovergnity offered by it’s intellectual traditions. To give a sense of my thinking on these, and other topics, some of the writers who have captivated my imagination in recent years are— Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Alasdair Macintyre, Reinhardt Kosleck, Sylvia Wynter, Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, Friedrich Nietzsche. Quentin Skinner (to say nothing of the countless poets who have more profoundly shaped my view of reality, Mariner Rilke, Muhammad Iqbal and Mawlana Rumi, Goethe and Mirza Ghalib being the most notable among them).
