School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am a development and political anthropologist of South Asia. I have carried out extensive field research in Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, and Malawi on labour migration, border-crossing, Maoist conflict, humanitarianism, human rights documentation, international research collaboration, ethics governance, health policy and planning, community health volunteers, and maternal and child health.

At present, I am Co-Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies in Edinburgh.

I am the elected General Secretary of the Britain Nepal Academic Council (BNAC). Between 2019 and 2025, I was the Co-editor of HIMALAYA Journal transitioning into my role as Editor-at-large of HIMALAYA Journal from January 2025. I serve as an Associate Editor of 'South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies' and Co-editor of Routledge Edinburgh South Asia Series. I am a member of ESRC GAP panel C (2024-2025). I served as a member of the commissioning panel for the ESRC Centres Competition 2018.

I am the author of Crossing the Border to India: Youth, Migration and Masculinities in Nepal (2018, 2024), South Asia imprint published by Bloomsbury in 2019, ethnographically shows how the history, culture and the changing political economy of the middle hills of Nepal shaped the desire, the agency and the gendered and class-related experiences of young male migrant workers from poor households in rural Nepal shaping what I have called ‘the culture of migration’ in the hills of Nepal. My second monograph book Political Economy of Social Change and Development (2021) shows how powerful historical developmental processes experienced and negotiated in once-remote locations, may, at the same time, produce ideas of equality, human rights and citizenship, while paradoxically also generating new forms of precarity. 

Currently, I am leading a Wellcome Trust funded transdisciplinary collaborative research project, involving medical scientists and social anthropologists (in Edinburgh, Aga Khan University and Kathmandu Medical College). The project aims to generate new evidence on medical and non-medical risk factors including debt and recruitment costs, exposure to heat, working and living condition exposure to heat, working and living conditions, and co-design two interventions that can be used to improve care for migrant workers from South Asia.

Previously, I worked at Feinstein International Centre at Tufts University between 2009-2011 and Save the Children UK between 2007-2009.