Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: South Asian History, Partition Studies, Legal History, Nationalism, Colonialism

About Me: I am an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, where I teach South Asian history with a special emphasis on colonialism, nationalism, decolonization, and the afterlives of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. I am the author of Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India(Harvard and Permanent Black, 2011, pbk 2016). I am currently working on a comparative legal and political history of hate speech against minorities in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. I am also a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C.

Recent Publications: Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2011; Paperback 2016

‘Introduction’ to Ghosts from the Past? Assessing Recent Developments in Religious Freedom in South Asia, a special issue of Asian Affairs, 49:2, 2018, pp. 199-204

Perspective: ‘Rising Religious Intolerance in South Asia,’ Current History, April 2018

‘Towards mass education or “an aristocracy of talent”: non-alignment and the making of a strong India’, in Gyan Prakash, Michael Laffan, and Nikhil Menon eds., The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia, London: Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 183-200

‘What did Gandhi Stand For, And How Is His Legacy Faring in Today’s India‘, Huffington Post India, 10 October 2017

‘Indo-Pak Relations: A Window of Opportunity that has Almost Closed‘, Economic and Political Weekly, December 20, 2014, Vol. 49, No. 51

‘Beyond the “communal” 1920s: the problem of intention, legislative pragmatism, and the making of section 295A of the Indian Penal Code‘, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, July 2013, Vol. 50, No. 3, pp. 317-340

Media Coverage: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/special-issue-asian-affairs-addresses-religious-freedom-south-asia