I’m a Cultural Anthropologist of South Asia with Bachelors’s in Sociology, a Master's, and a CPhil from UC San Diego, where I wrote and defended my qualifying exams on “secularism and genealogy of the 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 a 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 ethnography of resistance, adaptation, and co-option. I also worked at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi as a Junior Research Fellow under Prof. Farida Khan, and at Coventry University as a Research Fellow with the Center for Trust, Peace and Social Relations.

My overarching aim is to engage with the 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, and intellectual history to open the possibilities for understanding the oriental subjects from their own perspective by situating their positionality within the forms of knowledge that we export to the academic industry, while being sensitive and careful in 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 ethnography, textual analysis, and archival research to understand the truth without detaching its ontology from power relations. 

CURRENT PROJECT IN MAKING

At the University of Virginia, my current project traces the connections between modernity, Islam, and the formation of secularity within postcolonial societies. I’m examining the intellectual and religious traditions of Kashmiri Muslims, whose critical engagement with Indian secular thought marks a crucial turn at the beginning of the 20th century, as they grapple with the limits of modern nation-states and the pitfalls of secularism that shaped its moral habitation. Understanding these disparate, conflicting genealogies of political thought requires situating the sovereignty of Kashmiri Muslims within a distinctive conceptual history attuned to vernacular genealogy, one that also shows how sovereignty came to define the minority question across the arc of Global history. Thus, nodes of modernity and secularism became two crucial, progressive, and linear shifts that came to define what Charles Taylor calls “Modern identity” in unique ways, and they make it imperative to recuperate, unmoor, and grasp the voices of marginal subjects by examining their authority from the unique moral standpoint of Islamic tradition within such transitions. I’m particularly interested in tracing the grammar of secularity, its genealogy 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 examining these critical engagements as timeless snippets which are often assumed to sustain the ritualistic sense of religious belonging, I place them within 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 them, to think about loss, community, tradition, and critique while wrestling with new disciplinary modes of power and the law of modern empire? 

RESEARCH INTERESTS:

Religion and Secularism, Islamic Traditions, Political Theory, South Asia, Colonialism,  Sovereignty.

I now engage with epistemes that revolve around three disciplinary axes, critical theory, social theory, and Islamic studies, which also most directly situate my research on Kashmir. I have made “discursive tradition” the locus of my study because it steers the body's orientation toward certain forms of truth, while also enforcing power relations by transforming bodies into ethical subjects. I’m indebted to Alasdair MacIntyre and Muhammad Asad, whose work has inspired me to think about the questions of time, tradition, and authority in history.  More broadly, I explore the questions of embodiment, intimacy, secularity, and agency within non-Western theory and Western political thought, and what we can learn from the intellectual traditions of non-Western philosophical antecedents that have been ignored within Western epistemology, particularly those that provided a robust foundation for European intellectual history at the dawn of enlightenment.

Regarding the former, I engage primarily with questions of legal and political theory, though my interest has grown in exposing the paradoxes and contradictions in the secular logic that informs our conception of the modern state, which has also led me to 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 understanding the different forms of social and cultural life that sprang from interpretations of Islamic discourses that redefined the sphere of politics, society, and culture in Modern Kashmir.  In doing so, I aim to sketch alternative epistemologies that draw on the subterranean thought processes of Islamic scriptures, which helped Kashmiri Muslims reimagine notions of moral justice, forge new political sensibilities, and assert unique concepts of sovereignty offered by their intellectual traditions. To give a sense of my thinking on these and other topics, some writers who have captivated my imagination in recent years include Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Alasdair Macintyre, Reinhart Koselleck, Sylvia Wynter, Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, and 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).

FORMER ADVISORS:

Professor Charles Hirschkind, UC Berkeley

Professor Harvey Goldman, UC San Diego

Professor Ross Frank, UC San Diego