Research

Currently, I am working on a book project tentatively titled Marvi’s Sisters: Hindu Belonging and the Muslim State in Pakistan, which is based on two years of archival research and extended ethnographic fieldwork among Hindu communities in Sindh, Pakistan. This project examines how religious minorities navigate the regulation of difference and identity in a modern Muslim polity. It focuses on everyday practices of political claim-making and the management of domestic relations by Pakistani Hindu women. I think about how secular power operates by disciplining Hindu and Muslim selves, and how it intervenes in the rhythms of everyday life to alter older forms of intimate and neighborly relations between religious communities. I ask how historical memory might interrupt regimes of governance, and how practices of sexuality and desire inform alternative modalities of belonging.

My doctoral research, on which this book project is based, recently received the Honorable Mention for the 2021 S. S Pirzada Dissertation Prize in Pakistan Studies. My project has been generously funded and supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. At Johns Hopkins, the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute; the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality; the Centre for Islamic Studies; and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences provided support during the dissertation’s pilot research and writing up phases. IBA Karachi’s Department of Social Sciences provided institutional support during fieldwork in Pakistan.