About

I am a historian of gender, economic life, and the British Empire, with a specific focus on twentieth-century South Asia, the Second World War, and the global legacies of empire for contemporary patterns of inequality and development.

I am currently a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University’s Center for History and Economics.

My research is motivated by the enduring question of how women’s economic agency is shaped and constrained by the world around them. My current book project centres the working lives of women pushed to the margins of society by their gender and socio-economic status, arguing that women’s labour — paid and unpaid — is central and structural to the South Asian economy. Taking 1940s South Asia — a time of war and famine — as an archival lens, it examines how women living in poverty navigated the labour market.

Before coming to Harvard, I completed a DPhil and MPhil at the University of Oxford. I previously read for a BA in History at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. The University of Oxford, the Oxford Global History of Capitalism Project, Kellogg and Brasenose Colleges, the Royal Historical Society, and the Institute for Historical Research have generously supported my work.

I have been a visiting fellow at the Centre for History and Economics, University of Cambridge and at the Department of Economics, Gakushuin University.

I grew up in Kolkata, India.