91ɬ��

I am James B. Duke Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History at 91ɬ��. My research interests include modern South Asia, global political economy, social theory and the history of economic thought.

I am currently working on my book Invisible Attachments: Global Finance, Developmentalism and Subjectivity in South Asia. The book documents how South Asians participated in constituting new subjectivities as forward-thinking, ideal economic subjects as ties of credit and other financial forms bound agrarian hinterlands, global financial and physical infrastructures together. I think of the book as having two parts that are constantly in conversation with each other: one strand concerns the ways in which finance structured “development” undertaken by the colonial state while the other focuses on how colonized South Asians began to engage with the world through economic and financial logics. In situating South Asia within an interdisciplinary conversation on finance, the book works against merely fitting colonial spaces into the history of modern capitalism primarily as sites of dispossession and accumulation for production and circulation elsewhere. Ultimately, my book argues that finance emerged as the very basis of welfarism as a mode of governance in the late-nineteenth century, revealing a much longer, and globally interconnected history of financial individuation than afforded by accounts of welfarism’s “other”: contemporary neoliberalism.

I believe in work that cuts across disciplinary boundaries and welcome students from a broad range of majors and backgrounds with interests in South Asia, law and global empires, histories of science and intellectual history, capitalism and finance. 

I grew up in Calcutta (now, Kolkata) but think of Delhi and New York City where I spent close to a decade each as home too. Over time, I have nurtured strong parasocial relationships with my favorite tennis players and Bollywood celebrities. No 90s and 2000s film is not so bad as to be good (we do not speak of the ‘80s). I am also always happy to have a chat about speculative science fiction. 

I am away on research leave this academic year as a .

Teaching

HIS 171: Making Modern South Asia, 1730-1950
HIS 277: Possession: Property, Empire and Law, 1500-present
HIS 272: Inventing India: The Rise of Hindu Nationalism, 1850-present
HIS 377: Capitalism and Crisis: A History of Now, 1600-present
HIS 473: Bollywood Nation: Infrastructure, Identity and Globalization, 1920-present
HIS 475: Neoliberalism: A Global History
HIS 2xx: Credit to the Nation: Money and Sovereignty in Modern History
HIS 3xx: AI and the Scientific Revolution