I am currently finalizing my first monograph entitled Creating an Early Colonial Order: Conquest and Contestation in South Asia, c.1775-1807, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2018. It will examine, for the first time, the implications of protracted warfare and the processes of state-formation for the establishment of colonial rule in eighteenth-century South Asia. I have also published on the politics of mobilizing Indian soldiers for the First World War.
My research on eighteenth century history has developed into another project on the political economy of conquest and the origins of colonial finance as a part of the East India Company state’s bid to monopolize all legitimate means of coercion. This work will involve an in-depth engagement with the material basis of early colonial rule and territorial contestation in South Asia.
My growing research on twentieth century north India is currently being developed into a project that explores violence towards women that has been historically important in this region and has generated significant contemporary interest. This project will make a substantive intervention in debates over – persistent gender discrimination in rural North India, changing meanings of domesticity, marital violence and property ownership, religious beliefs and the life histories of women as subaltern agents.