Research

My PhD project provisionally titled The Real and the Remembered: A Study of Mussoorie’s Production and Evolution through Travel Narratives (1825-2025) aims to study the historical representations of Indian hill stations, focusing primarily on Mussoorie, located in the Central Himalayan region and part of the present-day state of Uttarakhand in India. I will investigate the historical colonial production of Mussoorie (and other such hill towns) through colonial and postcolonial travel narratives– scientific as well as sentimental, and Mussoorie’s ensuing development into a popular tourist destination.

With my project, I aim to contextualize the past and present purpose of hill stations in the colonial and postcolonial history of India and the British Empire and the Himalayan scientific and sentimental exploration, along with venturing into fields of Himalayan environmental history, and history of tourism and travel writing.

My project is supervised by Dr Thomas Simpson and Dr Guido van Meersbergen and is funded by the Wheeler History of Travel Writing Programme.

Background

I completed my Bachelor's and Master's in English Literature from the University of Delhi and Jamia Millia Islamia, respectively. During BA, while my major was Literature, I earned a minor degree in History. Similarly, during MA, I had two papers in History. I was born and brought up in Mussoorie, after which I moved to Delhi for higher education. The different experiences I had in these two places got me interested in the historical production of space, the metropolitan and the peripheral, and my PhD project is, in many ways, an attempt to examine this through travel narratives in the specific case of Mussoorie.

Prior to PhD, I worked as a freelance researcher, editor, and translator with scholars and publishing houses based in India in areas such as partition studies, food and cultural memory, spatial studies, gender and minority studies, history of sufism and islam in the subcontinent, and translation.

I can be reached on the email ID mentioned below.

Education

• 2021-2023: M.A. English Literature, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi
• 2018-2021: B.A. (Honours) English, University of Delhi, Delhi

Research Interests

• History of South Asia
• Global History of Travel Literature
• Himalayan Environmental and Scientific History
• Spatial Studies
• Translation Studies