I am an anthropologist focusing on questions of citizenship, secularism, and sexuality in South Asia. Currently, I am working on two projects. The first one is a book project which draws on ethnographic research in lower Sindh to argue that secularized state power in Pakistan operates through anxieties around the potential failure of kinship. The book shows how minoritized Hindu and Dalit women’s bodies, desires, and relationships are entangled with techniques of governance and the specter of the religious other. It uses feminist methodologies to think about how everyday life and the domestic realm can subvert nationalist modalities of belonging and exclusion.
My second project is a series of articles about the once and future struggle for caste emancipation in Pakistan. Although invisibilized in national discourse, caste-based hierarchies and associated forms of violence continuously burst through erasures in ways that seep into everyday relations and also demand attention from a state determined to look the other way. How are categories of social analysis around caste and religion produced and contested, and how do people imagine alternative political possibilities from the margins of ideological polities? Writing from this project has appeared most recently in South Asia and Journal of Sindhi Studies.
At LUMS, I teach introductory and advanced courses on a range of topics including the anthropology of law and human rights; gender, sexuality, and religion; minorities and the state; and modern South Asia. My office hours in Fall 2023 are by appointment (send me a sign-up email). I am also affiliated with the Gender and Sexuality Studies minor and the Mahbub-ul-Haq Research Center. I hold a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University (2021), MA from the University of Chicago (2012), and BA from LUMS (2011).