I am interested in history, historiography, and religion; in the ways these things are practiced together; and the ways that the latter has been excluded from the former two by various dominant knowledge systems in South Asia and by the fortunes of political economy. In my work I propose that several kinds of performance traditions, which are largely oral/dramatic ones, have maintained a historiography that remains unrecognized as such by the Euro-American and South Asian academics. I suggest that the problem lies with certain decisions that have been made about literacy and orality, and especially about the function and meaning of religious practice. I work mainly in two Indian languages: Hindi and Marathi.

My current research projects and intentions are:

• An ethnographic history of a neighborhood in Delhi, Lajpatnagar 1, that was one of the first settlement areas given by the newly independent government of India to refugees from Pakistan, specifically from Punjab. This study will explore how cultural life was transposed and adapted in this new living space, and how the history of Lajpatnagar 1 and its residents reflects the larger political economic history of India since Partition.

• A critical study of a late 19th/early 20th century British civil servant in Bengal, William Crooke, who largely initiated the study of "folklore" and "folk culture" about India. The interest of this study is to understand how Crooke's paradigms for understanding culture were different from mainstream Orientalist and colonial scholarship, and why folk studies seemed not to take hold in the investigation of South Asia culture and history during Crooke's time or since.

• A project about the interplay between colonial policies pertaining to print and Indian religions expressed through vernacular publications, especially in the Bombay Presidency under the tenure of Mounstuart Elphinstone. In particular, this study will look at how pre-printing practices of oral textuality and historiography conditioned ways of printing Indian religious materials in colonial and postcolonial India.