My research interests include intersection of music, labor, and national identity; the entanglements between Black American and Indian musicians during the era of decolonization; and the cultural history of cosmopolitan Bombay. Broadly, I am interested in exploring the sonic archive to understand how film, folk, classical, and other musics have created and subverted national identity in modern South Asia.
“The Limits of Progressive Politics : B.R. Ambedkar and the Muslim Question in India”
Harvard University Archives, Honors Thesis in Social Studies (2022)
B.R. Ambedkar, the most resolute critic of the caste system in colonial India as well as the architect of the Indian Constitution, has long been considered the embodiment of “progressive politics'' by scholars of modern South Asia. Yet his writings on Islam, which remain entirely understudied, reveal an unexpected adherence to exclusionary colonial assumptions about the innate foreignness of Indian Islam, often deploying rhetoric virtually indistinguishable from the Hindu Right, of both his time and of ours. How do we reckon with this icon of equality and inclusion championing troubling colonial frameworks about Indian Muslims, even as he attempts to articulate a truly revolutionary anti-colonial vision for the nation’s future? Analyzing this hitherto unexplored contradiction in Ambedkar's political philosophy, this thesis explores how the entrenched legacies of colonialism restricted the emancipatory promises of even the most progressive strand of nationalist politics. Drawing on Ambedkar's writings and speeches from 1931-1950 (the decades preceding and following Indian independence), I show how Ambedkar's attachment to colonial stereotypes about Islam structured his development of the “progressive” conceptual frames of self-determination, minority solidarity, and secularism. This thesis thus complicates both Ambedkar’s legacy as well as the limits of “progressive” politics in India.
“Khadi Capitalism: Gandhian Neoliberalism and the Making of Modern India”
Brown Journal of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics vol. 3 no. 2 (2020)
The political philosophy of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi offers an entry point to address fundamental questions about nation thinking, modernity, and postcolonial futurity: can the postcolonial subject articulate political possibilities that move beyond the nation state without sacrificing the material considerations of global capitalism? Is it possible to imagine and enact a world order that transcends the hegemonic structuring forces of Western modernity? While historians and political theorists of contemporary India argue that Gandhi rejected modern frameworks of nationalism, industrialism, and rationality, I contend that Gandhian political philosophy, rather than existing above the conceits of Western modernity, is intimately tied to neoliberal forms of social relations and economy. The fundamental methodologies and frameworks undergirding Gandhian political philosophy ultimately reinscribe the hegemonic global capitalist order even while they seem, on inspection, to articulate a radically different vision. I suggest that a critical reading of Gandhi -- one that accurately locates his political philosophy as a modern intellectual contribution -- is necessary to make sense of India’s postcolonial future.
“Minority Rule: Partition Politics and the Rise and Fall of Dalit-Muslim Solidarity”
Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal vol. 7 (2021)
This paper excavates Dalit-Muslim solidarities in anticipation of Partition, the catastrophic division of British India into India and Pakistan, a strand of revolutionary praxis that has been all but erased from the archives of history. By weaving an intellectual history of two fundamental anti-caste figures, Jogendranath Mandal and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, I seek to address how Dalits and Muslims used their minority status to theorize political subjectivities and organize against the hegemonic caste Hindu supremacy of the mainstream Indian nationalist movement. Mandal and Ambedkar both used the Muslim as a mirror through which to understand the political futurities of the Dalit, a strategy which ultimately grew untenable in both India and Pakistan. I conclude by suggesting that in order to narrate a Dalit history of Partition, it is necessary to contend with the inherent incommensurability between elite or dominant South Asian nationalism and Dalit liberation.