Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre at LUMS

On leave AY 2024-25

I am an anthropologist interested in questions of citizenship, secularism, and sexuality in South Asia. Currently, I am working on two projects. The first one is a book project which draws on ethnographic and archival research in lower riparian Sindh which argues that women's sexuality and role in sustaining kinship hold the key to understanding how religious others become transformed into minority citizens. The book centers Hindu and Dalit women's domesticity, desires, and relationships as a critical vantage point to view the secularized logics of governing identity and marginalization in Muslim majority Pakistan.

My second project is concerned with the struggle for caste emancipation in Pakistan. Although the government invisibilizes caste as an axis of inequality, anti-caste progressives make claims that can destabilize the existing majoritarian framework of the Pakistani state. In a series of articles, I ask how categories of social analysis around caste and religion are produced and contested, and how people imagine alternative political possibilities from marginalized positions. Writing from this project has appeared in American Ethnologist, South Asia, and Journal of Sindhi Studies.

I am also affiliated with the Gender and Sexuality Studies minor and the Mahbub-ul-Haq Research Center. I hold a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University (2021), MA from the University of Chicago (2012), and a BA from LUMS (2011).

My office hours in Fall 2023 are by appointment (send me a sign-up email). In AY 2023-24, I am teaching the following courses: 

ANTH 244 Political Anthropology

ANTH 320 Qualitative Research Methods

ANTH 452/GSS 413 Sacred Femininities