I recently graduated from Cambridge University with an MPhil degree in Modern South Asian Studies. My dissertation, “Religious Pedagogy, Caste and Gender: Mapping Saptaham Publics in Kerala” examined caste, gender and Hindu Nationalist politics within ritual publics known as Saptahams. Besides this, I recently published a book chapter as the first author titled, “Figure of the Domestic Worker in “Maid in Heaven”: Study of Digital Untouchability in Contemporary Media”. The chapter posited that the representation of domestic workers in digital media produced and consumed by upper-caste youth reveals deep-rooted, classist and casteist anxieties regarding the loss of control over workers because of post-liberalisation urban restructuring.
I am also passionate about making academic work more accessible through multimodal methods, especially film. Currently, I am working as a sound editor and panellist for Declarations: The Human Rights Podcast at the Department of Politics and International Studies in Cambridge. I also volunteer at Amnesty International as part of the Digital Verification Corps and the People’s Archive of Rural India.
Current Research:
In India’s 2024 General Elections, the right-wing Hindu Nationalist party, BJP shockingly made in-roads into the communist-dominated state of Kerala. For several years, the BJP has been penetrating everyday life through temples, by advancing Brahmanical knowledge traditions, in order to construct a “Hindu atmosphere”. My MPhil research examines the ritual public of the Saptaham in this context.
Saptahams are seven-day rituals during which professional scholars recite and interpret instructive verses from the Brahmanical text, the Bhagavata Purana. It has accelerated in popularity over the last twenty years in Kerala. The reciters are predominantly Brahmin men, though recently some women and men of other castes have also gained popularity. Curiously, these followers are almost exclusively women from diverse caste groups. My research examines the production of bhakti within the gendered and caste-marked space of the Saptaham, considering the wider context of Hindu nationalism.
I am interested in three broad themes: (i) political articulations and formations within ritual life, (ii) the fallacy of “castelessness”, and (iii) Brahmanical femininity. I argue that rather than being realised through the internal world of the devotee, bhakti is produced within a Saptaham public, and used by right-wing forces to transform public life and assert Brahmanical domination.
Areas of Study:
Cultural Studies, Hindu Nationalism, Caste, Gender and Sexuality