Biography

I’m broadly interested in the socio-ecological dimensions of imperialism, peripheral capitalism, and decolonization—and changing nature of the postcolonial state within the context of shifting global dynamics. 

I address these themes in my dissertation through an examination of the political economy of palm oil in India. I investigate the somewhat contradictory and controversial push for the large-scale domestic cultivation of oil palm, via contract farming, ostensibly to reduce import dependence (about 60% of India’s edible oil needs are met through imports). Importantly, oil palm is entirely unfamiliar to the country’s agroecological and culinary heritage. Engaging scholarly debates on flex crops, contract farming, food sovereignty, and the nature of peripheral capitalism, I situate this push to establish what I call the oil palm ‘frontier’ within a longue durée historical framework, through which I account for the recent rise of an increasingly powerful agro-industrial capitalist class within the history of agrarian underdevelopment from the colonial era to the present.

Another strand of my research is on the political and intellectual history of twentieth-century decolonization in Asia and Africa, Third World internationalism, and debates within these movements on questions of agriculture, the environment, and the state. In particular, I’ve spent considerable time over the past few years examining the archives of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation, a key organ of anticolonial internationalism in the latter half of the twentieth century.