RESEARCH INTERESTS

Early Modern and Modern South Asia; the history of capitalism; intellectual history and the history of political economy; comparative histories of caste, race, and slavery; the history of modern sport; historical musicology; social theory

BIOGRAPHY

I am a heterodox economist and a historian of early modern and modern South Asia. I earned my PhD from New York University and am currently serving as a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at The University of Chicago. 

My work has appeared in various academic journals and public fora in both English and Bangla, including The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Modern Asian Studies, Critical Historical Studies, Development and Change, Review of Radical Political Economics, The Daily Star, The Platypus Review, and Nirantar. 

I am currently working on my first monograph titled Subaltern Aspirations: Caste Struggle, Commercialization, and State Formation in Bengal, 1538-1833, which shows that new aspirations to transcend caste hierarchies emerged at this time among peasants, weavers, artisans, rural slaves, and petty merchants belonging to lower and middling castes. They insisted that commerce should be free from arbitrary impositions by upper-caste elites and states, that everyone should have a property right over their bodies and labor, and that the labor of lower-caste peasants should give them a property right in the soil. These aspirations found plausibility not only due to regional cultural movements and transformations in subcontinental politics but also due to the entanglement of South Asia in increasingly global commercial networks from the sixteenth century onwards.

PUBLICATIONS

"The Politics of Commerce in Eighteenth-Century Bengal: A Reappraisal," Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 61 No. 1 (January 2024).

"Capitalism, Caste, and Subaltern Aspirations in India: Bengal, c.1500-1859" in Capitalism: Histories, edited by Robert G. Ingram and James M. Vaughn, Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer (forthcoming, January 2025).