I am a political scientist working at the intersection of comparative politics, political theory, and international relations. My research asks how shifting political orders justify the forms of knowledge and standards of progress through which they govern, and what happens to those justificatory practices when inherited systems of political authority lose credibility.

Focusing on South Asia, I study this problem across the transition from empire to constitutional democracy and, increasingly, from constitutional institutions to computational governance. My work examines how political classification, public knowledge, ideas of progress, and claims to self-respect become sites through which political authority is constructed, contested, and reconstructed.

My first book project, Justification After Empire: Anticolonialism and Democratic Reconstruction in India, examines how the collapse of imperial authority generated a problem that political independence could not itself resolve: how to legitimate political order when the structures of knowledge, social hierarchy, and progress inherited from empire remained politically consequential. It traces rival efforts to reconstruct those inheritances through anticolonial thought, constitutionalism, representative institutions, civilizational politics, and democratic public discourse. Funding for this research was secured from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, and Columbia’s Core Curriculum.

My second book project extends this inquiry into digital and algorithmic governance. It asks what happens to democratic legitimacy when the structures through which citizens become politically intelligible are increasingly embedded in digital identity systems, data infrastructures, and computational supply chains.

At Columbia, I teach Contemporary Civilization, the Core Curriculum’s year-long seminar in moral and political thought. I have also designed and taught courses on anticolonialism, constitutionalism, democracy, and global political thought.

Research areas: Comparative Politics · Political Theory · South Asian Politics · Constitutionalism · Political Classification · Democratic Development · Technology & Politics · AI Governance