About

I am a researcher from Assam, currently based in Berlin. I graduated from Hindu College, University of Delhi in 2014 with a degree in English. After that, I moved to Germany, attending Freie Universität Berlin for a masters degree in English Studies where I wrote my thesis comparing the poetry of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Agha Shahid Ali. For my PhD, I worked on the international publishing networks of Indian poetry, studying the manner in which canons of a postcolonial nation reflect nationalism and its many definitions. I worked on my research as a part of the DFG-funded Research Training Group "minor cosmopolitanisms" from 2019 till the January of 2023. I successfully defended my dissertation in the summer of 2024. Since October 2024, I have been a postdoctoral researcher working on the cultural and colonial legacies of tea—more specifically, the way in which Assam tea has remained a site of racial, cultural, and ecological contestations.  

Between 2021 and 2023, I was a board member of Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkolonial Studien (GAPS) for Early Career Scholars. Besides postcolonial poetry, I am usually to be found talking about sneakers, sports, and all matters caffeine.

Current Project

Tea is a malleable object that brings together many strands of history and culture together. On one hand, it is perhaps the most “English” of cultural products, and on the other hand, it is impossible to think about tea without thinking of the materiality of the indentured labourers who created the product and are inextricably linked to this history. How can we hold such tenuous histories that are violent and generative of the world that we live in? This project attempts to read cultural texts like tea advertisements, travel writing from the 19^th century, and baganiya music as sites of contestation(s) and creations of identities. This project attempts to decentre the way in which statistics and archival records have written about the indentured labour in Assam, even after India became an independent postcolonial nation. To understand the circuits of culture as resilient, I argue that we have to treat tea as a “frontier commodity”—one that has determined how terms like “wastelands”, “coolie”, and “baganiya” locate not just material bodies, but in turn, embody the ideologies of race and caste as legacies of power in postcolonial India.

Research Interests

• Postcolonialism
• Indian Poetry
• Cultural theory
• Empire and ecologies
• Popular culture

Organization and Outreach

Postcolonial Environmental Humanities Working Group (ongoing) Link to the website

Poetics of Glissant Reading Group (ongoing) Link to the website

Produced episode for podcast “The Minor Constellations” with guest Zoran Terzić (November 2021) Link to the episode

Organized GAPS Postgraduate Forum conference titled “Modernities in the Contact Zone: Translating Across Unfamiliar Objects” with Kathleen Samson, Florian Schybilski and Baldeep Grewal (October 2021) Link to conference CfP

Organized the panel “Transmitting the Archive: Minor Cosmopolitan Spaces and Erased Histories” with speakers Dr. Anandita Bajpai, Dr. Promona Sengupta, and Netta Weiser in: Minor Cosmopolitan Assembly (November 2022)

Organized screening of film “The Sound of Friendship: Warm Wavelengths in a Cold, Cold War?” (dir. by Dr. Anandita Bajpai, 2021) in Minor Cosmopolitan Assembly (November 2022)

Co-organized with Florian Schybilski, Poetry Reading Evening at Hopscotch Reading Room (May 2023)

Conferences/Workshops

“Jungly Stock: Reading the histories of racialization of Assam Tea” in: GAPS Annual Conference, Universität Zurich (May 2024)

“Moi Lagi Baganiya: Colonial (Agri)Cultures in the Postcolony” in: Annual Conference of RTG “Empires” – “Environmental and Cultural Destruction in Imperial Spaces”, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (December 2023)

“Interfacing the Archive: Mediating Infrastructures of Postcolonial Literary Research” in: GAPS Annual Conference, Universität Konstanz (May 2023)

Workshop: Modern Jewish Experiences beyond Europe – minor perspectives on modernity, 14-15 June 2021  

"Configuring the ‘World’ in ‘World Literature’: A Case Study of Arundhati Roy’s Reception in Berlin" in “World Literature Conference – Postcolonial Perspectives”, University of Delhi, 15-17 March 2018

“A missed land: Producing the Postcolonial Nation in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry” in REPRESENTATIONS OF HOME, Conflict and/or (Be)longing: Thinking with Stories and Images, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, 16-17 November 2017.

"Manto’s Necropolis: Constructing Violent Partition Histories through Violated Bodies" in LOVE AND TERROR: Feminisms in Transnational Perspectives, Inter-University Centre Dubrovnik, 22-26 May 2017.

"A Half-Caste Othello: The Poetics of Adapting Shakespeare in India" in Minor Shakespeares, University of Split, 23-24 September 2016.

Publications

“THE GESTURE WITHERS FOR WANT”: Reading Arun Kolatkar’s ‘the boatride’ in: A History of Punctuation in English Literature (edited by Elizabeth Bonapfel et al.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (forthcoming)

“Pearls of a Rare Hue”: Partition Histories in Manto’s Necropolis in: Feminisms in Transnational Perspectives. UniorPress, 2023 (forthcoming)

Special Issue: Modernities in the Contact Zone: Translating Across Unfamiliar Objects (ed. with Florian Schybilski) in: Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium (2023)

“Pierce a Diamond First”: Negotiating with Kabir’s “Modern” Translations in: Minor Perspectives on Modernity Beyond Europe (edited by Y. Attia, J. Hirsch, K. Samson). Baden Baden: Ergon, 2023, 53-69