I am the Co-Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies and a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Environmental and Climate Justice at the University of Edinburgh. My research examines the urgent political struggles at the intersections of Indigenous lifeworlds, social movements, and extractive capitalism, with a core focus on how communities contest dispossession and mobilise alternative ecological futures. I am currently writing a new monograph tentatively entitled: "Fractures of the Himalayan Anthropocene" for the Cambridge University Press. It is based on over five years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Indian Himalayas, analysing the entwined terrains of environmental justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and the turbulent infrastructures of hydro-modernity—where dams, rivers, and mountains become sites of both violent transformation and decolonial possibility.

My first book, The Political Life of Memory: Birsa Munda in Contemporary India (Cambridge University Press, 2023), investigates the contested legacies of anti-colonial resistance and the political life of memory in contemporary Indigenous movements. I have also edited Governing the Crisis: Narratives of COVID-19 in India (Routledge, 2025) and At the Crossroads of Rights (Routledge, 2022), which collectively foreground shifting regimes of governance and lived struggles for rights and justice. Before joining Edinburgh, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oslo Metropolitan University, contributing to the Norwegian Research Council–funded project Riverine Rights, which explores the implications of recognising rivers as legal persons.

I hold a PhD in Political Anthropology from the University of London, following earlier studies in Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi. Across my work, I remain committed to collaborative scholarship that amplifies Indigenous sovereignties and strengthens environmental justice movements shaping our shared planetary future.

I am currently supervising the following students:

1. Nabanita Samanta: The Littoral Imaginaries in Sundarbans, India

2. Eric Okwir: Greening the tea? Ecolabelling, anticlimax and the remaking of conservation people in Uganda.