Research Interests

My main research interest draws from my PhD thesis ‘Absent societies: Contouring urban citizenship in postcolonial Chennai’, where I examined the way the new middle class in Indian cities employ their bourgeois sensibilities of propriety and right to paraphrase urban citizenship and their claims to the city. I am currently developing three strands of focus coming out of this work.

The first looks at how a bourgeois state and its citizenry have constructed a new development discourse around ‘elite’ issues such as heritage and environment framed increasingly around dominant class interests. Looking at the role of political ecology on the constraining nature of urban citizenship in a neoliberal condition, I have undertaken an assessment of the rehabilitation initiatives in India following natural disasters such as the 2004 Tsunami and the 2005 floods which have involved covert and overt mechanisms of disciplining the poor and marginalised. I have been investigating the re-scripting of planning regulations by the Indian state using the rationale of an "expert" yet exclusive techno-scientific knowledge system.  I have just completed fieldwork in Chennai looking at the state-sponsored Adyar Eco-Park whose aestheticised discourse is steeped in socio-spatial purification strategies and disguises a more violent politics of eviction. In addition, I am also looking at the media coverage and middle class responses to the launch of Tata Nano, illustrating the rhetoric of a bourgeois environmental debate.

The second strand seeks to diversify my disciplinary approach to studying the Indian middle class and hence sets its examination within the debates of global health. Combining discourses from geography, anthropology and epidemiology, this project looks at how the middle class understand the rise of diabetes and obesity as a specific manifestation of globalisation and neoliberalisation, and thereby address the epidemiological transition to chronic non-communicable diseases in urban India. While my PhD and current research concentrated on developing an ethnography of one particular city (Chennai), this research adopts a comparative approach and is set in the three southern Indian cities of Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. This research is being jointly undertaken with Dr. Haripriya Narasimhan from LSE Anthropology.

The final project looks at the political economy of diasporic pilgrimage in India. This emerged from my field interrogations with the middle class which revealed their reflexive relationship with the non-resident Indian (NRI), a specific manifestation of the Indian diaspora, and by looking at the NRI as a pilgrim-tourist during their regular ‘return visits’ to India, I intend to explore how the NRI negotiates his/her diasporic identity. In this regard, I have established a research group on Diaspora and Development within the British Association of South Asian Studies (BASAS). Through this group I hope to bring together scholars working on the Indian diaspora who try to understand it beyond the simple, traditional discourse of nostalgia for cultural symbols.