Publications

The Cambridge Companion to Periyar (Cambridge University Press, 2025) is a timely academic intervention which brings together scholars working on different aspects of modern Tamil politics, taking diverse perspectives, to comment on Periyar E. V….

A majority of Indians do not have effective access to legal services, despite the constitutional promise of access to justice. There are two intertwined reasons for this: the unavailability of a sufficient number of good…

“On August 5, the J&K Home department notified the ban of 25 books, also marking the Director of Libraries in J&K, likely directing for the books to be removed from public libraries in the region….

The more things change, the more they remain the same. The aphorism captures the sentiment aptly when reading the Report of the Indian Universities Commission, 1902 today, particularly its section on legal education. It raises…

“As the SIR threatens to disenfranchise swathes of Bihari migrants, most workers lack the awareness, documentation or wherewithal to reclaim their rights.” Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do…

A review of the historian Audrey Truschke’s fourth book, India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent. The book is a history of the subcontinent built from the stories of traders, nuns, slaves, and scholars….

[with Jordan Namchu, PhD Candidate, Sociology, IIT Bombay] The article examines the growing significance of World Indigenous Peoples’ Day in India, despite the Government of India’s refusal to recognise Scheduled Tribes (STs) as “indigenous peoples”…

This article reflects on the passing of Shibu Soren, fondly remembered as Dishom Guru, a towering figure in Jharkhand’s Adivasi movement. It traces his role in transforming grassroots resistance into a broad-based political struggle for statehood…

Globally, transmen face structural erasure—not only due to their gender-diverse identities, but also because they were born in female bodies, traditionally viewed as inferior. Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author…

[with Hugo Gorringe] Tamil Nadu has a proud history of politics committed to social justice. Failure to act decisively against the scourge of caste-violence and so-called honour-killings, contributes to the perception that egalitarian commitments have…

The contemporary literature on Indian universities is rife with discontent about academic freedom. Apart from attacks within and outside the university on the production and dissemination of knowledge, the state has systematically undermined institutional autonomy…

The arrest of two Catholic nuns from Kerala in BJP-ruled Chhattisgarh on charges of forced conversion has triggered political uproar and exposed the BJP’s divergent postures toward Christians. What appears to be a contradiction in…