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I study the Sylheti people who migrated to Shillong after their homeland, Sylhet, ceded to East Pakistan during the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947. My interdisciplinary project combines social history and ethnography to understand their displacement, rehabilitation and struggles for citizenship by linking state-making with borderland forms of popular Hinduism in India’s northeastern frontier. I argue that popular Hindu religiosity was a means for Sylhetis to self-organize and fulfil unaddressed material needs while also articulating an ethical and affective praxis of nationhood and citizenship. I first outline how state actors like political parties, bureaucrats and municipal leaders implemented uneven refugee rehabilitation in Shillong. I then explore how marginalized Sylhetis, such as low and middling-caste shopowners, widows and abandoned ‘fallen’ women, petitioned to contest these disparities, revealing their interpretations of what constituted rehabilitated lives and citizenship. I show that, when petitions failed, marginalized Sylhetis developed self-guided infrastructures of habitus rehabilitation. Using guru-figures, their hagiographies, fund-raising, and devotional repertoires of music, food and rituals, they formed networks of communal care-giving, caste-kin relations and landedness. I argue that the petitions and religion-inflected communal rehabilitation shaped both, an affective-ethical architecture of the state and citizenship, and genealogical fragments of contemporary Hindu nationalism in the region.

Advisor: Mary Hancock, Anshu Malhotra

Dissertation Committee Members: Utathya Chattopadhyaya, Kate McDonald

World History, South Asia, Historical Methods, Philosophy of History, Migration, Infrastructure and Spatial History, Urban History and Anthropology

Within South Asia:

  • 11th century to present
  • North-East India
  • Religions and Pluralism
  • Gender and Sexuality

Teaching Associate:

  • HIST 9 (Summer 2025): Historical Methods
  • HIST 88 (Summer 2024) : Intro to South Asian History

Teaching Assistant: 

  • FAMST 46 and 96: Intro to and Advanced Film Analysis
  • FAMST 124 : Indian Cinema
  • HIST 2A, B, C : World History
  • HIST 4A, C; HIST 121, 141: Mediterranean and European History
  • HIST 8: Latin America
  • HIST 88: South Asia
  • HIST 49C: History of Africa

Research Languages: English, Hindi, Bengali, Sylheti, Assamese, Farsi (Persian)

Additional training: Korean, French, Spanish