As a political anthropologist, I have a keen interest in “the political” in its diverse manifestations and scales: the everyday politics of survival and life on the margins; the activist politics of social movements, NGOs, and radical groups; the politics of the state and citizenship; the politics of global governance and aid by international organizations like the World Bank; and finally, the politics of knowledge production. My regional specialization is South Asia and I have conducted fieldwork in India. From women’s development programs intended to transform gender relations to transparency and anticorruption laws that aim to reform the state, I study the social life and effects of initiatives that seek to “empower” citizens and establish good governance. These laws, projects, and policies function as spaces of encounter, bringing together social movement activists, NGOs, ordinary citizens, and state officials in complex negotiations with each other; these are the key actors in my work.
My forthcoming book, A Technomoral Politics: Good Governance, Transparency, and Corruption in India, published by the University of Minnesota Press, offers an ethnographic meditation on good governance politics in India today, arguing that it is a technomoral, translocal assemblage: that is, it is a complex and shifting blend of charged ethical vernaculars about “goodness” and technical expertise about laws and policies, on the one hand, and local imperatives and global standards of neo/liberal governance, on the other. In order to shed light on this assemblage, the book follow the twists and turns of a group of activists led by Arvind Kejriwal from 2008 to 2014 as they morphed from a small pro-transparency NGO to a mass movement against corruption to a populist party that promised to change the political system through laws and reforms and came to power in Delhi. This shapeshifting, kaleidoscopic politics of good governance, at once judicialized and populist, brims with paradoxes and risks. I analyze this politics for what it reveals about statehood and bureaucracy, citizenship and rights, the social life of laws and liberal activism, and populist authoritarianism in democratic contexts. My previous book, Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender and Governance in Neoliberal India, also published by the University of Minnesota Press, focused on the paradoxical outcomes of a rural women’s empowerment program started as a partnership between feminist groups and the Indian government. I have co-edited, with Akhil Gupta, The Anthropology of the State: A Reader.
My work has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, including the American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Citizenship Studies, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Anthropology Now. In a 2018 article in Current Anthropology, titled “New Brooms and Old,” I discuss corruption as a “limit” problem, full of grey areas, and the difficulties of resolving it through the law. In a 2016 collaborative article, with Erica Bornstein, published in the American Ethnologist, I describe the “technomoral politics” of NGO, movement, and state actors on the issue of corruption, as they struggle to claim moral authority and political legitimacy as the keepers of public interest and democratic values. In a 2014 article on anticorruption politics in India published in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, I examine the use of “brand Gandhi” by various political and civil society actors, as they fought over an anticorruption law, juxtaposing these contemporary debates about Gandhianism against a history of Gandhi’s activism. My 2013 article in the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, uses the social life of India’s 2005 Right to Information law to illuminate the politics and paradoxes of state transparency, showing how citizens attempt to make the state accountable and how government officials subvert transparency through common bureaucratic means. I published two journal articles on my research on state-led women’s empowerment projects: The first, published in Cultural Anthropology in 2006, parsed the governmental workings and contradictory outcomes of government-organized NGOs (or GONGOs) and the second, which appeared in Citizenship Studies in 2011, examined rural subaltern rights-claims and citizenship talk in India. My public anthropology-oriented writings have appeared in Anthropology Now, where I engage the politics of fieldwork and “native” anthropology, and on the popular Indian political blogsite “Kafila – 12 Years of a Common Journey,” where I shed light on the gendered nature of mainstream debates about India’s democratic transformation that do not question the patriarchal nature of state institutions and of citizenship.
I earned my doctorate and masters from Stanford University in Cultural and Social Anthropology. I also have a master’s degree in International Affairs from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree from The New School for Social Research with specializations in Economics, Politics and Feminist Studies. I have native fluency in Hindi, spoken fluency and basic reading skills in Punjabi and Urdu, a working knowledge of Russian (speaking, reading and writing), and basic knowledge of Spanish.
I have served as secretary of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.