I am a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at UBC, working under the supervision of Dr. Alexia Bloch. My research deals with migration, materiality, visual cultures and gender, with a focus on methodological concerns within the discipline. My MPhil research dealt with the affective responses of a digital public to images of migrant precocity in India during the Covid-19 pandemic. My earlier work was with visually impaired persons, religion and gift giving.

My doctoral study focuses on homemaking as a project influenced by circular migration between urban and rural locations in India, and primarily involving women employed as domestic workers in the city. Three kinds of homes get implicated in this study— i) homes left behind in the villages, ii) homes where migrant women live in the cities where they work; in some cases slums (jhuggis), separate from places of work, each of which require a different sensibility and orientation, affecting the ways in which they are ‘made’, curated and lived in.

Circular migration, or regular short-term dispersal to locations away from place of residence is often studied as a mode of economic diversification. I aim to focus on the sensory aesthetics of internal migration to take a fresh look at the category of home as an entity torn among several sites and its material cultures as more tangible empirical anchors to understand urban relational encounters. Not only will this project enable an illustration of patterns and trends in movement, urbanisation and postcolonial development, it shall also help develop new understandings of regional modernities and aspirations in the making. I see it opening up the possibility of a fluid discourse among new and old materialities, image flows, spiritualities, aspirations and affects specific to transcultural homemaking. My work can create a generally applicable analytical framework and contribute to anthropological discussions around home and mobility to provide insights on lived experiences of (re)settlements and (dis)placements.

Regionally, I intend to conduct multi-sited research in the rural districts of West Bengal, particularly Bardhaman, Birbhum and Bankura as the locations of origin, and the metropolitan cities of Kolkata and Delhi as sites of arrival.

• Manuscript in Progress –
  ‘A Flag, A Rap and the Ethnographer’-  Chapter for Bolt, D. ed. Cultural Stations of Blindness, Routledge
• Muttering Women and the Talking Kitchens of Bengal
  EPW, Vol. 56, Issue No. 33, 14 Aug, 2021
• Rethinking Possessions
  Partition Museum Vlog, Jan, 2021
• Book Review: Nathan Jurgenson, The Social Photo, p 173-76,
  IJET Journal, July 2020, ISSN 2581-8325, Vol. 2, No.2, July 2020
• Walls That Speak : Visual Background as a Window to the Social Background
  EPW, Vol. 55, Issue No. 20, 16 May, 2020
• A Bibliography Apart
  LiveWire, 6 Oct, 2020
• Hisaab: The Price We Pay For Menstrual Bleeding Every Month
  Feminism In India, 2 Jun, 2020
• For Assar, My Friend From Kashmir
  LiveWire, 22 Feb, 2020

Four Year Fellowships (FYF) For PhD Students (2021 – 2025)

President’s Academic Excellence Initiative PhD Award (2021-22)

International Tuition Award

Four Year Fellowships (4YF) Tuition Awards