Research

My research is shaped by two intertwined areas of focus- histories of South Asian migration and mobility; and bottom-up approaches to diplomacy and IR, with a particular emphasis on caste. My first book, Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy, brings together these interests. With Pavan Kumar and Vineet Thakur, I have co-edited a first of its kind special issue on ‘Caste in Indian Diplomacy and International Relations’ for the Hague Journal of Diplomacy, published in September 2025.  For a list of selected publications, click here.

I am currently working on two projects :

First, a book project titled Caste at Bay: Mobility and Anti-Caste Internationalism Across the Bay of Bengal that explores anti-caste movements and mobilities across the Bay of Bengal in the twentieth century. Drawing on multilingual literary, cinematic, and archival sources and tracing the mobilities of performers, diplomats, journalists and activists crisscrossing Madras, Ceylon, Malaya, and Burma, it offers an important intervention in histories of internationalism by centering caste.

The second is a collaborative, interdisciplinary project titled Global Histories of South Asian Repatriation. This project moves beyond the dominant focus on (e)migration to foreground prolific histories of repatriation and ‘return’ to and from South Asia in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods.