Biography
I am a historian of modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean, from ca. 1750 to decolonization. My work centers on how power is exercised in and on Muslim societies, and how political genealogies are shaped by regional and global histories of empire and colonialism.
My first book, Hajj across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture after the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge, 2024), examined how South Asian Muslims navigated the revolutionary age between Mughal imperial decline and British colonial consolidation by forging transregional ties through pilgrimage to Arabia and the Ottoman world. For a preview of the book’s themes, you can read a short piece I wrote for the Cambridge University Press blog.
I was formerly an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, and a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study.
I am now working on two new books. The first, Mughal Enlightenment: The Command of Subjects in Colonial Thought, reconsiders how Persian – a classical lingua franca of India and the Indian Ocean – transformed under colonial rule. It reveals how Mughal munshis (scribal workers) engaged with European sources and actors to coproduce novel vernacular epistemologies of science, art, narratology, medicine, ethnography, and political economy. The second is a history of the Nawabs of Dacca, a merchant clan turned landed dynasty that used a colonial peerage to reinvent themselves as neo-Mughal nobles loyal to the Victorian Raj. The book reconstructs the family’s pivotal role in broader currents of Muslim communal mobilization in modern South Asia.
