Assistant Professor

Asian Studies, Religion, Culture, Power

I am a historical and political anthropologist of modern South Asia with particular interests in questions of religion and secularism, colonial modernity, nationalism, violence, memory and subjectivity. My current book project is an ethnographic and historical exploration of the Muslim question in postcolonial India. Entitled Legacies of Colonial History: Region, Religion, and Violence in Postcolonial Gujarat, the book provides a historical anthropology of the rise of political Hinduism and the routinization of anti-Muslim prejudice and violence in the western Indian state of Gujarat. The book draws on ethnographic and archival research in Gujarat and explores the reconfiguration of ideas of region, religion, space and belonging, and their implication in the production of the state's Muslim minority as Other and as threat. I explore how violence against religious minorities is an effect of historical transformations wrought by the establishment and consolidation of a modern regime of power in its colonial and postcolonial forms. Given this, I suggest that we rethink the dominant representations of the religious and the secular as antagonistic and argue that the reconfiguration of ideas of space, belonging and religion in Gujarat cannot be grasped without taking into consideration how they are fundamentally altered by technologies of modern power deployed by the colonial and postcolonial state. One result of this simultaneous reconfiguration of religion and region, I argue, is that it has become increasingly difficult to inhabit a Hindu religious identity that is not at the same time articulated in opposition to a Muslim Other in Gujarat.

I have also started preliminary research on questions of religious conversion and religious freedom in modern India. I explore how debates about conversion and religious freedom have been historically imbricated with emergent notions of authenticity and indigeneity and have played a crucial role in enabling the policing of the boundary between "Hinduism" on the one hand, and "Islam" and "Christianity" on the other in India.

I received my Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University. I am the recipient of several grants and fellowships including the Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, the Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, the Columbia University Travelling Fellowship, the Columbia University Core Curriculum Fellowship, and a research grant from the Samuel Rubin Foundation (New York). Prior to joining Colorado College, I taught in the anthropology department and the Core Curriculum at Columbia University and at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University.

Regular Classes

CC 104 Religion, Race and the Climate Catastrophe
RE 200 Anthropology of Religion
RE 200 The Minority Question in Asia
RE 202 Colonialism and Religion
RE 207 Politics, Religion and Secular