India

Asian elephants have been an integral part of social life in India for centuries – as war elephants, participants in temple rituals, heavy laborers, and recently in conservation discourse.

The book project, “Capitals in the Margins: South Asia Since Partition” seeks to answer why, despite the shared experience of colonial British rule and a shared investment in anticolonial nationalist movements, South Asia remains the least integrated region in the world.

How did British colonial efforts to expand “commodity frontiers” come to shape environmental changes on one hand and contestations over belonging, citizenship and territory on the other in South Asia?

I plan to do a historical analysis of the convict labor used by the British East India Company in the early nineteenth century in their newly acquired territory in the North Western Provinces of British India.

I study the interaction of state capacity and an underexplored religious institution – religious cults that center around one figure of authority.

What can Gandhian ideas offer to a world caught in ever-expanding environmental crises?

My doctoral project examines the complex legal and social attitudes towards women who committed 'reproductive crimes' such as infanticide and abortion in colonial India.

This research takes the form of a creative documentary film to describe and interpret how the pharmaceuticals have shaped the landscape specifically looking at the impending crisis of the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the environment.

A three-day festival of documentaries from India.

There are oceans of writing in Urdu and Persian that have not been translated into other languages.