My research interests have evolved since I began work as a graduate student specializing in economic history of western India and its linkages with the Indian Ocean. Trained as an economic historian, I worked with the colonial archive of the English East India Company to develop a thesis on indigenous capital and its collaboration with colonial expansion in the late 18th and 19th centuries. I have retained my interest in the Indian Ocean and indigenous trading networks in the Ocean and have contributed significantly to the field. My most recent work that looks at Piracy and Law in the Indian Ocean, addresses the methodological challenges of writing about indigenous agency while using a colonial archive.

 

From about the 2000’s, I have worked on the history of cultural practices in twentieth century South Asia and write extensively on music and performance in modern South India. This project involved engaging with new methodologies that drew from cultural studies and social anthropology. I continue to work in this field and my most recent project that has matured into a full-fledged book on Gandhi and Sonic nationalism reflects the challenges of writing about subjective experiences like listening and performing.

 

The two ongoing research projects that I handle now refer to the long-term social history of trust and business in modern India and to the history of objects and their social lives respectively. The underlying rationale behind proposed project on Trust, Law and Commercial practices in south Asia: A historical perspective is to think systematically and innovatively about the idea of trust seen as a modern promise and grounded in a very specific European tradition. It wishes to explore the notion of trust in non-European societies, especially south Asia where there was both a long and established tradition of mercantile and commercial practices that hinged crucially around relations of reciprocity. These features however, do not figure in standard understanding of Indian business and enterprise, partly because of the ways in which colonial knowledge reconstructed and reconstituted Indian mercantile behavior as treacherous, unreliable and dishonest and partly because of the eclipse of Indian business activity in the so-called formalized sector. It is in this context, the project intends to examine a range of indigenous commercial agreements and business and fiduciary promises and situate them within an ecology of quasi-legal writing genres that came up for presentation in European courts such as the Mayors Court in Bombay. Responding to the recent work of Fahad Bishara on law and economic exchange in the Indian Ocean and of Amalia Kassler’s study of the Paris merchant court, this project intends to grapple with the ideas of custom, practice and law in the domain of economic life in the 18th and 19th centuries and how these changes as business operations expanded and as formal channels of adjudication introduced new principles of ‘reason, equity and fairness’, not to speak of new bureaucratic procedures and protocols. The second project is on a history of three iconic objects that mark the manufacturing history of Godrej&Boyce. These look at the Storwel, the Godrej refrigerator and office chair and track the changing design and their social meaning in the context of middle class aspirations and consumption behavior. The project is supported by Godrej Archives Mumbai and the intention is also to foreground the immense archival wealth of the form and to persuade other business houses to open their archives to professional historians and students.