Profile

I am a first-year PhD student with The Vulnerable State project, a Leverhulme Trust funded research project based at the Criminal Justice Centre at Warwick. Hosted in the Department of Sociology, my doctoral research explores the moral emotions of street-level bureaucrats who work with Hindu and Sikh asylum seekers from Pakistan and Afghanistan in west and northwest India. I utilise ethnographic methods to reveal the labour of navigating moral emotions at the heart of bureaucratic practices and tasks.

Before joining Warwick, I graduated with an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. My MPhil thesis examined dialogue as a critical site for ethical self-cultivation among British Gujarati Hindus. I also hold an MPhil in Theology, Religion, and Philosophy of Religion (Distinction) from the University of Cambridge and a joint Bachelor of Arts in Theology and Oriental Studies (Sanskrit) from the University of Oxford.

Research

My research explores how street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) in Rajasthan and Gujarat, such as administrators and police, manage moral emotions when working with Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan and Afghanistan. My approach reveals the labour of navigating moral emotions that emerge from bureaucratically enacted practices—vocal exchanges, documentation cycles, and even physical force—tasks where SLBs embody the state. Building on anthropologies of the state and the sociologies of emotions, I consider how SLBs perceive their role in the governance of marginalised groups and handle moral emotions in everyday work. I ask:

• What kinds of religious values, ethics, and customs inform the moral work of SLBs?
• How do SLBs use their understanding of the state’s spatial and temporal processes, exercised through visual and material forms of bureaucracy, to cope with moral emotions, including but not limited to, failure, powerlessness, and frustration?
• How do SLBs negotiate moral emotions in situ by employing particular grammatical formations in their interactions, such as the use of first or third person, reported speech, and tenses, and what does this tell us about the humanitarian-punitive complex?

My project advances scholarship on the state through a bottom up approach by exploring the challenges and dilemmas associated with embodying the state at its most interpersonal level, contributing to a research gap identified by the Vulnerable State project.

Research interests

Teaching

Guest lecturer 

"Contemporary issues in the study of Hinduism" for BA module, Introduction to Religion, University of Roehampton, London

I have also participated in seminars and workshops on inter-faith dialogue and contemporary issues in religion.