Before joining LSE, I did my Masters in International Relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and my M. Phil in Political Science at the University of Hyderabad. This training, along with several political changes in India, piqued my research interest in Indian citizenship and minorities. Later,  through my engagement with Tibetscapes in IIT Madras, I began to re-work minority histories outside the framework of national citizenship and through the lens of refugees and transregional migration.

Provisional Title: Refugees, Identity and the State: Post-partition histories of citizen becoming in India

My project places the ‘fuzzy’ figure of the – refugee – juggling international, regional, national and even sub-national regimes; as central to rethinking Indian citizenship. Through a comparative case study of the two largest post-partition refugee communities in India: Tamil ‘repatriates’ from Sri Lanka vis-à-vis Tibetan ‘foreign guests’, I examine the paradoxes in the changing definitions of Indian citizenship in the fifties, sixties and early seventies.