Research

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.

Political orders do not govern through institutions alone. They also depend on categories that make populations politically intelligible to governing institutions and each other, and standards through which institutional transformation can be defended as progress. These categories shape the practices through which those subject to political authority recognize, or contest, the terms through which they are governed. The categories that repeat across justificatory structures become particularly visible during periods of political transformation, such as transitions from empire to democracy, and democratic governance to algorithmic governance, where categories used by previous political orders to justify their rule persist but the principles that once legitimized them are contested.

My research examines how postcolonial states, laws, and public discourse respond to this problem. While the processes of decolonization seek to transform the institutions, classifications, forms of knowledge, and standards of progress inherited from colonial rule, such transformation is often contested by rival conceptions of categories that must replace the forms of knowledge and standards of progress established by colonial rule. I study the struggle for justificatory power that emerges from these rivalries of the decolonized world, particularly in South Asia, where majoritarian nationalism contends against the democratic reconstruction enabled by constitutionalism. I assess how these rivalries draw, in contradictory ways, from various traditional and technological sources to justify the forms of knowledge and standards of progress they use to order political life.

India is the principal historical and contemporary setting for this research. I use its experiences as a major colony of various modern empires, decolonization, constitutional transformation, democratic development, and technological change to articulate why justificatory discourse after empire remains caught in a battle of what is truly legitimate political power.

Justification After Empire: Anticolonialism and Democratic Reconstruction in India

My first book manuscript, Justification After Empire: Anticolonialism and Democratic Reconstruction in India, examines how the transition from empire to democracy transformed the justificatory foundations of political authority. Decolonization created a distinctive problem of challenging the authority of empire without eliminating the political classifications, structures of social knowledge, institutions, and standards of progress through which empire governed plural jurisdictions in the colonies - i.e., areas under direct administration, princely states, and areas under indirect rule. Reconstructing democracy after empire, therefore, required more than transferring sovereignty or designing new constitutional institutions. It required reconstructing the political and legal vocabularies through socially different and often hierarchical populations could become equal claim-makers in public life. Democratic reconstruction under decolonization inherited institutions from empire but sought to evaluate and transform them so that citizens could participate in authoring the political order to which they were subject.

The book develops this argument through three interconnected problems of democratic reconstruction. Knowledge concerns the categories through which populations and political differences become intelligible to governing institutions and to one another. Progress concerns the competing standards through which political and legal institutions, and public discourse, evaluate inherited institutions and justify their transformation. Self-respect concerns the conditions under which those who have been governed as objects of political authority can participate in constructing and contesting its terms, as well as redefining the terms on which they are defined in public life.

Drawing on multilingual archival research, constitutional and legislative debates, administrative records, political writings, and public discourse, the book traces competing responses to these problems across colonial knowledge, anticolonial political thought, princely-state reform, constitutionalism, representative institutions, social movements, and majoritarian civilizationism. It shows how struggles over caste, religion, tribe, territory, representation, and political membership became struggles over the terms of democratic authority itself.

The book develops an account of democratization not simply as the creation of representative and stable institutions but as an ongoing process of reconstructing the forms of knowledge and standards of progress through which political institutions govern public life.

The book contains seven chapters. The first chapter explores how forms of knowledge of the colony were established by colonial administrators, imperial philologists, and census takers, who classified the diversity of the colony into lasting categories: they separated overlapping philosophies into fixed religions, diverse people into ossified social identities, and various regions into jurisdictionally different and legally plural territories. The second chapter explores how empire used these categories to justify the management of colonized populations as progress, and the multiple challenges it faced from diverse forms of anticolonial thought in doing so. The third chapter narrows these challenges to the argument coming from those who embraced self-respect as a primary political ideal, and argued against the objectification of colonized populations, particularly those in its social margins, by modern governing institutions. The fourth chapter explores how these claims proliferated in princely states in India, where constitutional monarchs established modes of governance that sought to create what I call ‘constitutional publics’ in the late colonial period. The fifth chapter turns to constitutional debates on democratic reconstruction after empire in India, its dilemmas regarding the incorporation of diverse groups into a consolidated Indian federation, and the establishment of just social relations between them as sovereignty moved from empire to a decolonized Indian nation. The sixth chapter examines the challenges that this constitutional democratic reconstruction has faced from majoritarian nationalism and its adoption of a civilizationism discourse to replace constitutional principles as a form of justification for political order. The final chapter turns to the use of computational infrastructures and digital governance by the postcolonial Indian state to stabilize political order - assessing if these infrastructures can be contested in a postcolonial democracy.

Political Classification, Democratic Contestation, and Digital Sovereignty

Going ahead, I aim to extend my research through questions of political classification. States necessarily classify. They distinguish citizens from noncitizens, territories from administrative exceptions, minorities from majorities, and populations eligible for different forms of representation, recognition, or redistribution. Yet classifications do not merely describe political communities. They help constitute the populations, interests, and inequalities upon which political institutions act.

My work would examine how democratic constitutionalism, particularly in postcolonial countries, transforms this authority by redistributing the power to classify across legislatures, courts, commissions, parties, movements, and publics. I am particularly interested in the conditions under which categories inherited from unequal political orders can become publicly visible, politically contestable, and institutionally revisable.

My published research has examined these problems through indigenous recognition and Scheduled Areas, religious and territorial membership, minority political thought, caste and self-respect, and constitutional justification in India.

My second book project extends these questions into the politics of digital identity, data infrastructure, and algorithmic governance.

Constitutional democracy developed an institutional ecology through which classificatory authority established by empires as well as postcolonial states could be contested. Representative institutions enabled classified groups to make political claims; constitutional provisions made categories consequential for recognition and redistribution; courts subjected classification to legal scrutiny; and parties, movements, commissions, and public discourse provided competing sites from which governing categories could be challenged and reconstructed.

Digital governance is reorganizing this ecology. Through research on digital identity systems, India Stack, citizenship verification, AI governance, and computational infrastructure, I examine what happens when systems necessary for making populations politically intelligible acquire increasing governing authority while becoming more difficult for democratic publics to identify, understand, and reconstruct.

I call this the Knowledge of Structures Problem: the possibility that the structures through which governments know and govern populations become increasingly consequential to democratic life while becoming decreasingly available to ordinary practices of political contestation.

The problem is not simply whether algorithms reproduce social bias. It is also where classificatory authority is located, how its exercise becomes visible, and what institutional capacities citizens possess to contest it.

Digital Sovereignty and International Political Economy

The politics of computational governance also extends beyond the territorial state. Digital identity, AI systems, cloud computing, semiconductor production, data centers, technological labor, and digital platforms embed domestic political institutions within transnational infrastructures. States seeking to expand technological capacity therefore confront tensions among development, sovereignty, democratic accountability, and dependence on concentrated computational supply chains.

My research investigates how different histories of state-building and political classification shape contemporary approaches to digital identity and computational governance, and how those domestic trajectories interact with the international political economy of technological infrastructure.

This work extends my broader research question into a new institutional setting: how are political authority and its justifications reconstructed when the infrastructures through which states govern are increasingly transnational, computational, and difficult for democratic publics to contest?

Comparative Research

My future research develops these questions comparatively across India, Singapore, and South Africa. These cases provide different trajectories of colonial classification, postcolonial state-building, democratic institutions, and technological governance through which to investigate how inherited structures of political knowledge shape contemporary digital states.

Rather than treating comparison principally as a search for institutional similarity, I use it to examine how different histories of political classification and institutional development condition the ways states justify and organize new forms of governing authority. This comparative agenda connects historical institutional analysis to contemporary questions about state capacity, democratic accountability, political development, and technological change.

Research: Modern Empires · Anticolonialism . Political Legitimacy · Political Classification · Constitutionalism · South Asian Politics · Technology & Politics · Digital Governance · International Political Economy · Global Political Thought.