I am a doctoral student of History, specializing in Modern South Asia. My dissertation studies policing in twentieth-century India, focusing on the Tamil countryside. Rather than study the police as an isolated institution, I examine the techniques of policing—the routes they patrol, the forms they fill, the laws they invoke, and the memories they efface—through which the sovereign power of the state makes itself felt. My study also engages with the force of law and of exception in the late colonial and postcolonial Indian state, for police power is visible as much through the interstices of legality as it is in enforcing the law.

By virtue of their relatively ubiquitous presence (relative to other agencies of the state) within rural society, the police could impact societal relations in an insidious manner. Southern Tamil Nadu, the site of my study, was infamous for violent clashes between three caste-groups for much of the twentieth century. My dissertation seeks to examine this societal conflict, not as unchanging expression of an inherent antagonism between castes, but rather as a site through which to interrogate the manifestation of police power in society.

I have presented parts of my work at the South Asia Conference in Wisconsin-Madison, the Tamil Studies Conference in Toronto, and the Modern South Asia Workshop at Yale University. My archival research, conducted in a range of cities including Madurai, Tirunelveli, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, and London, was supported by the History Department at Princeton University and by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. In 2013, my colleagues Nabaparna, Christina, and I organized an inter-disciplinary workshop on “Modernity and its Discontents” under the auspices of the Princeton South Asian Studies Program.

Before coming to Princeton, I was, at various times, a student of History in Madras and Delhi Universities, a student of management at IIM Ahmedabad, a consultant in Bombay, and a part-time teacher in Madras and Bangalore. Along the way, I learnt a little French and German. Some Sanskrit was taught at home, a lot of Hindi at dormitories, while Tamil, my language of work, is also my native language.

Apart from researching crime and police violence, I read and watch plenty of detective fiction. Miss.Marple, Martin Beck, Poirot, and Wallander kept me company long before I commenced research on this occasionally gory topic.

View my current CV.

Dissertation Title:

"Police Matters: Law and Everyday Life in Rural Madras, c.1900-1960"