Overview
I am a political and visual anthropologist working in the areas of migration, borders, state power, aesthetics, and ethnographic film. My current research generates medium-specific insights across writing and film to advance political theory on majority-minority relations and majoritarianism. In the context of cross-border migration and immigration policy in South Asia, I ask, how do majorities come to imagine themselves as minorities? Conversely, how do minorities come to imagine justice as part of majorities? How do majority-minority politics exceed the parameters of states, in ways that are not nation bound?
Currently in production, my documentary film, Kitne Passports? (How many Passports?), features cross-caste, Pakistani Hindu migrant families in India, visualizing their shift between minority and majority status. The film is a second project that emerges from first project and forthcoming book, The People, in Parts: the Majoritarian Work of the Minority Form (forthcoming with University of Chicago Press). The book is an ethnographic account of Pakistani Hindu migration to India that theorizes the flexibility of the religious minority form across state borders in South Asia. Together, these works explore the relationships between religious nationalism, state machinery, and modes of cross-border belonging in the context of majority-minority relations in liberal democracies.
Extending my interest in uneven mobilities and borders, I am also completing an experimental short film series on the movement of non-human animals and everyday objects across the India-Pakistan border. Films in the series include: , Kaagaz ke Chakkar, and Enemy Property. I believe that the study and production of film offer insights into the embodied, sensory dimensions of knowledge production. My first ethnographic film, (Documentary Educational Resources), raised questions around the relationship between built infrastructure in New York City and labor infrastructure in Howrah, India in the context of everyday urban objects such as manhole covers.
Publications
The People, in Parts: the Majoritarian Work of the Minority Form. Forthcoming Book with University of Chicago Press.
American Ethnologist. 2024
Visual Anthropology Review. 2023
. Journal of Media Art Study and Theory. 2023
with Ghazal Asif. Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 2023
Cultural Anthropology. 2022
Journal of Immigration and Refugee Studies. 2022
Journal of Sindhi Studies. 2022
. Handbook of Refugees in India. Routledge Press. 2022
with Ghazal Asif. Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 2020
with Syantani Chatterjee. Political and Legal Anthropology. 2020.
Journal of Refugee Studies. 2018
Sikh Formations. 2014
Edited Collections
with Mohsin Bhat. Minority/Majority Politics. Borderlines. Forthcoming
with Zeynep Gürsel and Karen Strassler. . Visual Anthropology Review. 2023
with Syantani Chatterjee. Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 2020
Op-Eds
with Uttara Shahani. Times of India. 2025 Translated into Hindi and Sindhi.
. Dawn News. 2023
Translated into Nepali,
Films and Video Installations
Border Trilogy - Enemy Property (in Production); Kaagaz ke Chakkar (in Production); (Single-channel Video Installation, 9 min on loop, 2021)
Select Screenings: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Flaherty NYC, Mimesis Documentary Festival, Mellon Border Environments Seminar, Rhode Island School of Design; Experimenter Learning Programme; Cornell Biennial SWARM; CAMRA at Penn Screening Scholarship Media Festival
Kitne Passports? (in Production)
1982 (6 min, USA/India, in Post-Production)
Stand Stable Here with Vijayanka Nair (2-channel video installation, 8 min loop, 2019)
(8 min, India/USA/France, 2018)
Produced by The Grandmas Project
Jodhpur Films (50 min, India/Australia, 2016)
Childhood and Modernity Video Workshop Facilitated by Natasha Raheja
Directed by David MacDougall (Australian National University)
(10 min, USA, 2015)
Produced by the Southern Environmental Law Center
(26 min, USA/India, 2014)
Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources
Select Screenings: DOC NYC, Margaret Mead Film Festival, Sebastapol, Athens Ethnographic Film Festival, Sebastopol Documentary Festival, Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, ETNOfilm, ETHNOCINECA, International Documentary Association
(10 min, USA, 2012)
Sindhi Voices Project Oral History Interviews (2011-2014; archived with the )
Interviews and Roundtables
with Stephen Campbell, Adrian D. Godboldt, Elise Hjalmarson, Seth M. Holmes, Saida Hodžić, Natasha Raheja, Gerardo Rodriguez Solis, Arjun Shankar, Jennifer E. Shaw. . Anthropology of Work Review. 2024
Book and Film Reviews
Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights, Cultural Anthropology Website. August 27, 2020
Mediating Mobility: Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration. Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies (2018): 148-150.
American Anthropologist 119.4 (2017): 756-757.
With Rowena Potts. Visual Anthropology Review 31.2 (2015): 201-202.
