Publications

Publications:

Monograph:

Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (University of California Press, 2024)

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles:

“Building Peshawar: Labor, infrastructure, and technology at the edge of empire, 1848-1947,” Journal of Social History (2022)

"Writing Industrial Change in Urdu: Artisanship, Islam and Technology in Colonial India" South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2021)

"Butchers between archives: Community history in early twentieth-century Delhi," South Asian History and Culture (2021)

“Between Industry and Islam: Stonework and monumental tomb construction in colonial-era India,” Modern Asian Studies (2021)

"Translating the Scribe: Print and vernacularization in colonial India, 1857-1915," Comparative Critical Studies (2019)

"Printing Princely Modernity: Lithographic design in Muslim-led princely states,” South Asian Popular Culture (2018)

Public-facing publications

"How cycle mechanics helped India move," co-authored with Arun Kumar, The Wire (August 2023)

"Worlds Apart: How a writer from Lahore felt when he rode the London underground in 1900," Scroll (July 2023)

"The Kaghazis’ Story: How the Indian papermaking industry evolved, declined and transformed," co-authored with Arun Kumar, The Wire (April 2023)

"The Muslim-left legacy of an Urdu library in Mumbai," Himal Southasian (January 2023) 

“The workers who Typed: The labor of book production in modern India,” coauthored with Arun Kumar, The Wire (June 2022)

“The Labour of Smell, and How the Artisan Attar Industry Survived Pressures Across Ages,” coauthored with Arun Kumar, The Wire (February 2022)

“Empire and dependence in Afghan history,” Jamhoor (January 2022)

“Invisible women of colonial India’s textile industry,” co-authored with Arun Kumar, The Wire (November 2021)

“The social and economic worlds of Indian tailors,” co-authored with Arun Kumar, The Wire (September 2021)

“The colonial history of Indian carpentry,” co-authored with Arun Kumar, The Wire (August 2021)

“Afghan labour, colonial borders: Regulating migration in British and princely India,” Jamhoor (July 2021)

“From cholera to coronavirus: How prisons in contemporary India follow a colonial model,” Himal Southasian (December 2020)

“Racializing craftsmen: How martial race theory erased Pathan artisanship in colonial India,” Ajam Media Collective (July 2020)

“Hyderabadi cuisine: Tracing its history through culinary texts,” Sahapedia (April 2020)

“Archival research as fieldwork: Reflections on small and under-utilized Indian archives,” Critical Asian Studies (March 2019)

“The life and times of a British journal of Islam,” Himal Southasian (March 2019)

“The Politics of Persian education in India,” Ajam Media Collective (January 2018)

Book Reviews

Jesse Adams Stein, Industrial Craft in Australia: Oral Histories of Creativity and Survival (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Technology and Culture (July 2023) 

Velayutham Saravanan, Environmental History of Modern India: Land, Population, Technology and Development (Bloomsbury, 2022), H-Environment (October, 2022)

Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen (eds), Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories (Intellect, 2022), Journal of Religion and Film (October, 2022)

Samiparna Samanta, Meat, Mercy, Morality: Animals and Humanitarianism in Colonial Bengal, 1850-1920 (Oxford University Press, 2021), South Asian History and Culture (August 2022)

Francis Robinson, The Muslim World in Modern South Asia: Power, Authority and Knowledge (SUNY Albany Press, 2020), H-Empire, (June 2021)

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, people, empires, 1500-1800, (Harvard University Press, 2017) Himal Southasian (May 2018)

*Please contact me for PDFs if you would like to read my work and do not have institutional access*