Research

My research examines how modes of classification shaped by democratic experiments from 1940 to 2020 in South Asia reshapes the intelligibility of political legitimacy after empire. Bridging global history, political theory, comparative politics and international relations, I investigate how decolonization impacted the knowledge of the social sciences and its approach to progress, and self-respect. I study this impact by assessing how such knowledge redirected political intelligibility from structures of empire to structures of democracy through reconstructive constitutionalism, political institutions, and, more recently, algorithmic governance.

My current book project, Justification After Empire: Knowledge, Progress, and Self-Respect in India (forthcoming), asks how a post imperial democracy reconstructed mutual intelligibility among populations were not equal political claim-makers at the end of empire. It shows how opposing conceptions of classifying worldviews and people, paths of progress, and grounds of self-respect shaped justificatory discourse around the legitimacy of political authority and institutions in India. Using this framework, the book shows how justification after empire enabled a reconstructive form of constitutionalism in India and assesses if this constitutionalism has been sufficient in containing majoritarianism and the power of social hierarchy in India. It extends this assessment to contemporary India where classification and its

My next book project, The Knowledge of Structures Solution, extends these questions into the study of India’s role in global digital markets and the shaping of artificial intelligence.

Across these projects, my work aims to clarify how the legitimacy of authority is constructed, maintained, and contested under changing historical and technological conditions. By linking traditions of political and constitutional thought to the analysis of modern infrastructures, I seek to contribute to a realistic understanding of how knowledge in general, but of and by the social sciences in particular, shapes political and technological rule.