I’m a Cultural Anthropologist  of South Asia with Bachelors in Sociology, and pursuing PhD in UC San Diego. Although, I’m trained in interdiscplinarity that combines the innovative theoretical approaches and clout of other disciplinary boundaries, but I’m largely drawn to the theoretical charisma of philosophy, Political theory, and Anthropology which also steers my research questions both methodologically, and theoretically. From 2021 to 2023, I was Co-Investigator on a large network grant on 'Muslims in a time of Hindu majoritarianism' funded by the Luce Foundation (PIs Christophe Jaffrelot and Bernard Haykel, Manan Ahmed) in Collaboration with Princeton 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 new Delhi as Junior research fellow, and Coventry university. 

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 characterises 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, ethnic studies, political theory, and 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, and archival research together to understand the truth without detaching its ontology from the power relations. 

CURRENT PROJECT IN MAKING

“My current project traces the connections between the modernity, decolonisation, and the formation of secular within the post colonial societies such as south Asia where the minorities-such as Kashmiri Muslims, and their religious and political sensibilities, and their intellectual formulations were largely theorised in monolithic, homogeneous, and simplified narratives. By trying to understand their intellectual responses to different forms of movements such as those that confluence under the rubric of modernity, and secularism acquired the characteristics of colonial power. I’m particularly keen to track the circulation of different conceptual categories of secular, it’s history, and it’s formation in consolidating the posture of sovereign power that became, otherwise, defined the language of empire. The second strand of research, that I engage with is the genealogy of three intellectual traditions of Islam, in other words, three Islamic revivalist movements—such as Jamaat-e-Islaami, Ahli-Hadith and Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jama'ah and their location and dislocation from doctrine of concrete practice within the self determination movement in Kashmir. I’m interested in uncovering their ethical networks, political connections they forged between frontiers, and the forms of care, intimacies and ethical sensibilities they have cultivated through a range of theatrical devices or forms of life that are steeped into imaginaries of social justice, sacrifice, and different forms of morality. By location, I refer to how their different political orientations of modern nation state, political rights and religious rights and question of Kashmiri Muslims and their freedom forced them to reckon, function and reconcile within a unique form of political belonging which connected them  together ideologically to navigate the coercion, disciplinary power, and law of Indian empire.

Thus, the project examines how the secularism with a new form of orientation adapted by Indian State with new linguistic orientation by incorporating distinct epistemic sensibilities managed to contain the Kashmiri Muslims by invoking a secular conception of modern nation state, but at the same time, thrived on the violence that secular enforces through complex ways. In doing that, I’m trying to argue even though Indian State formed it’s own definition of secularism, but it deployed the similar forms of sensibilities of disciplinary power that helped the Christianity and it’s Empire in the West to dispossess native Americans under the rubric of modernity by cultivating the notions of redemption, compassion and suffering.

RESEARCH INTERESTS:

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

I now engage with epiestemes 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. 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.

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 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, forged new political sensibilities, and  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 Wittengestien, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Walter Benjamin, Sylvia Wynter, Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, Friedrich Nietzsche  (to say nothing of the countless poets who have more profoundly shaped my view of reality, Rilke, Iqbal and Rumi and Ghalib being the most notable among them).

I have published my reports, poetry and publications in space and polity, culture theory and society, Palgrave Macmillian, Harper Collins India, Caravan, Frontier Post, and Cultural Critique, Intellect.

SUPERVISORS: HARVEY GOLDMAN, (UC San Diego) CHARLES HIRSCHKIND,(UC BERKLEY) SHER ALI TAREEN( INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDIES, PRINCETON) YEN ESPIRITU AND ROSS FRANK( UC San Diego)