I am a Lecturer at Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, where I teach Contemporary Civilization, a year-long seminar on the history of political thought. My research examines how anticolonialism and democratic reconstruction in postcolonial democracies reshape global languages of justification after the collapse of modern empires. In particular, it traces how ideas of knowledge, progress, and self-respect were reshaped by democratic reconstruction in India, and the impact of this reconstruction on nationalism, public discourse, constitutionalism, and algorithmic governance in South Asia.

My first book, Justification After Empire: Anticolonialism and Democratic Reconstruction in India examines how democratic legitimacy is reconstructed after the collapse of modern empires. Rather than treating decolonization as the transfer of sovereignty or the making of a new nation-state, the book studies how anticolonialism and the polities it shapes confront a different challenge: rebuilding the conditions under which political authority, law, and public life could be legitimated after empire.

The book develops this argument through a series of conceptual problems that lay at the heart of democratic reconstruction after empire. It interrogates how political worlds became intelligible through imperial structures of knowledge, and how these structures of knowledge are challenged by competing anticolonial visions of progress that seek to imagine democratic futures. It studies how struggles for self-respect challenge inherited forms of political classification, how nationalism and civilizational thought reimagine political community, and how constitutional institutions seek to transform these competing claims into enduring forms of democratic authority.

Focussed on India, the book shows how questions of political classification, civilizational reconstruction, constitutional authority, and democratic legitimacy emerge from the effort to reconstruct political life after empire. It extends these arguments into the present, asking how they shape contemporary forms of governance.

Research for this project has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon International Travel Fellowship, the Columbia Core Curriculum, and Columbia University’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life.

 My second book project, titled The Knowledge of Structures Solution, traces how democratic South Asia becomes central to legitimizing digital infrastructures that shape the global AI supply chain. It examines India’s deepening technological, security, and economic entanglements in the international terrain, from semiconductor fabrication and nanotechnology produced by East Asian countries, as well in data creation and data flows for American and European social media, data regimes, and democratic life. Integrating these entanglements with democratic India’s earlier projects of reconstructing knowledge for a democratic people, this book aims to show why South Asian modes of categorizing people and building digital public infrastructure impacts global political discourse on data regimes, democracy, citizenship and migration, and technological futures.

Since 2021, I have taught Contemporary Civilization (CC), one of Columbia’s most competitive teaching appointments in the History of Political Thought. I treat the ‘big books’ I teach as studies in how moral ideas reveal and constrain power. I have also designed and independently taught seminar courses on global political theory, modern empires, and contemporary politics, and a Global Core lecture course on Gandhi and His Interlocutors.