I am currently working on my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. I am pursuing a joint-degree in the Department of South Asia Studies & Department of History. I am being supervised by Dr. Ramya Sreenivasan, Dr. Lisa Mitchell, Dr. Daud Ali, & Dr. Devesh Kapur.

d

Invited Talks & Presentations

• May 25, 2018 – “Monetary crisis and financial innovations in late-Mughal Gujarat: Anth and illegal exactions in the money markets of Ahmedabad” (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, India’s Politics in its Vernaculars workshop, Cambridge University)
• February 28, 2018 – “Elite business households, financial capital, and public authority in modern times” (Fels Institute of Government, University of Pennsylvania)
• November 17, 2017 – “From Diamonds to Denim: The Lalbhai Group and historical trajectories of contemporary family businesses” (Telling Histories of Business Families workshop, Princeton University)
• May 13, 2017 – “Local financiers, Mughal governors, and provincial warlords in eighteenth-century India” (New Frontiers in Asian Economic History workshop, Association for Asian Studies & Luce Foundation, Michigan State University-Lansing)
• November 12, 2016 – “The language of political shopkeeping in 18th-century Gujarat: Marifat and biware as recorded in the diary of a traveling Mughal bureaucrat” (India’s Politics in its Vernaculars workshop, University of Pennsylvania) Abstract
• October 30, 2015 – “The Haribhakti Family and the social world of Gujarati bankers, c. 1750-1908” (Business History of India & South Asia: Recent Trends in Research, Harvard Business School)
• March 29, 2013 – “Contesting boundaries, Remaking Space: The politics of change in Delhi’s urban villages” (Contested Spaces workshop, Penn) Poster Schedule

Conferences

Panels Being Organized

• “Methods & perspectives in writing Asian historical economies: Reading the economy through diaries, travelogues, and literary sources from India, Korea, and China” Special roundtable co-organized with Dr. Holly Stephens (Yale), Association for Asian Studies in Asia conference, New Delhi, July 2018 Abstract

Presentations

• April 5, 2018 – “Indigenous bankers, princely states, and accumulating debts in colonial India” (The Business History Conference on Money, Finance, & Capital, panel on “Family Capitalism in the Indian Ocean World”, Baltimore)
• January 5, 2018 – “Querying the Repository: Generating a data revolution from descriptive archival and library catalogs” (Lives of Data workshop on Computing, Money, & Media, The Sarai Program, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi)
• October 25, 2016 – “Rethinking land rights in early modern India: Small town financiers & the growth of revenue farming” (Annual South Asia Studies conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
• July 29, 2016 – “Manuscript variations of Dabistan-i Mazahib and writing histories of religion in Mughal India” (European Association of South Asia Studies conference, University of Warsaw-Poland)
• August 20, 2015 – “Changing landscape of Hauz Khas: Land Laws, city planning & monumentality in Delhi” (Inhabited Pasts: Many lives of monuments in Delhi seminar, Goethe Institut-New Delhi)
• May 8, 2015 – “Revisiting the ‘Great Firm’ theory of Mughal decline” (Graduate Student Conference, UC Berkeley)
• March 5, 2015 – “Elite business households and state formation in western India” (South Asia Graduate Student Conference, University of Chicago)
• May 17, 2013 – “Genealogies of the Urban Present: Land laws, city planning, and political practice in Delhi” (South Asia Conference, Stanford) Schedule Abstracts
• February 26, 2013 – “The changing landscape of Hauz Khas: Historical transformations in boundary and land use in ‘rural’ Delhi” (Urban Studies Colloquium, Penn) Abstract
• February 7, 2013 – “The changing landscape of Hauz Khas: Historical transformations in boundary and land use in ‘rural’ Delhi” (Institute for Urban Research, Penn) Poster

Current Projects

• Python in the Archives: Computational data mining and visualization of historical records from India
• Raga Darshan
• Urban Villages in New Delhi (Economic & Political Weekly article)
• Music, printing and intellectual production in nineteenth-century Calcutta