My research interests are driven by a desire to understand the ways in which processes of imperial decolonisation have affected the social, political and economic lives of people living in South Asia. This is developed though several major projects:

War and Society in South Asia

I am writing a book about the Second World War in South Asia and the way it disrupted Indian society and economy beyond the more well-known spheres of the Quit India Movement and the Indian National Army; how it shaped the lives of labourers, contractors, women and sepoys. This will be published by Random House (UK/India) and Oxford University Press (USA). It is a narrative history which draws on archival research, memoirs and interviews to interrogate the social dislocation of an imperial war and to complicate understandings of ‘loyalty’ and ‘resistance’. It aims to challenge simplistic dichotomies of acquiescence or resistance to the war by analysing the ways in which the conflict was radically restructuring Indian society. It also illustrates the coercive nature of Britain’s relationship with India during the war. This has the potential to challenge Eurocentric readings of the war by placing it in an imperial and international context, going beyond the important role of Indian servicemen during campaigns, to a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the war’s effects in the heartland of empire.

Transnational Business Elites in South Asia

I am interested in understanding how entrepreneurs and industrialists adapted to the rise of nationalism and the creation of the new states of India and Pakistan and, in particular, the intersections between business elites and nationalism from the 1930s to the present day. I have been writing about the rise of Muslim consumption and the idea of Muslim ‘swadeshi’ campaigns, Pakistani industrialists in the early years of independence and researching the interests of the Indian entrepreneur Walchand Hirachand. This research is connected to the major Leverhulme project, 'Global development: the role of trans-local elites in Afro-Eurasia’ (2010-2013) which will involve comparative work and dialogue with the scholars Professor Sandra Halperin and Dr Steffi Ortmann working on related developments in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The Partition of India in 1947 and the creation of Pakistan

My doctoral research analysed the impact of the partition of 1947 on refugees in the state of Uttar Pradesh and on Muslims in India in the early 1950s. I have also written about ethnic violence and refugee rehabilitation. This lead to my first book which is an attempt to connect social histories of violence and displacement with wider political questions about the causes of the creation of Pakistan, The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan (Yale University Press, 2007) which was widely reviewed in the national and international press, long-listed for the Orwell Award for political writing and won the Gladstone Prize from the Royal Historical Society. Recently, I have been analysing the impact of Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 on the formation of Indian state sovereignty in the context of Partition’s aftermath (Modern Asian Studies, forthcoming, 2010).