Ph.D. in Sociology (1995), Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, India.
Research interests: religion, the city, the body, social memory, South Asia.

My doctoral dissertation (published as The Mouths of People, the Voice of God: Buddhists and Muslims in a Frontier Community of Ladakh, Oxford University Press, 1998) is an ethnography of two Himalayan villages on the geopolitical boundaries between India, China, and Pakistan. It embeds constructions of cultural identity and cases of spirit possession within the context of borderland political economy.

My next major research project focused on Bangalore city, described as India' s
“Silicon Valley.” My book, Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High Tech City (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), examines the various pathways that history, memory, and the body take in a city inserted within global processes. Its central focus is a festival dedicated to Draupadi, the polyandrous wife of the Pandava brothers, heroes of the pan-Indian Mahabharata epic. This annual festival is the largest civic ritual in Bangalore today and attracts an audience of over 100,000 people for its key event---the incarnation of Draupadi in the body of a male priest from a community of gardeners. The book as a whole interrogates dominant models of Bangalore as a science city and presents other paradigms of public space emerging from religious cultures in the city.

My new book (In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body, City and Memory in a Global Religious Movement, Leiden/Boston: Brill and Delhi: Orient Longman, forthcoming 2008) is based on research conducted in India, the United States and East Africa. It examines a contemporary religious movement centered on the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba that has grown into an efficient transnational organization with thousands of devotional centers in India and abroad. In addition to Sai Baba' s charismatic role, I am interested in the relationship between contemporary religious movements and globalized urban society, their redefinition of citizenship and social memory through new institutional forms, and their novel regimes of the body.

Select Articles

2005       “Warrior goddess versus bipedal cow: Sport, space, performance and planning in an Indian city.” (With James Heitzman).  In James Mills, ed.  Subaltern Sports: Politics and Sport in South Asia.  London: Anthem Press: 139-171. 

2002       “Cities of the past and cities of the future: Theorizing the Indian metropolis of Bangalore.” In John Eade and Christopher Mele, eds. Understanding the City: Contemporary and Future Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell: 247-277.

2001       “The advent of the avatar: The urban following of Sathya Sai Baba and its construction of tradition.” In Vasudha Dalmia, Angelika Malinar and Martin Christof, eds. Charisma and Canon: Essays on the Religious History of the Indian Subcontinent. Delhi: Oxford University Press: 293-309.