Why do things happen? More importantly, what does it mean to say something happened? What accounts for change? What is an event? What–and where–is the past? How do we remember it?
In other words, what is the nature of history?
The older I get, the more these questions preoccupy me. Mostly I have approached them in the context of the region known (in the language of Cold War geopolitics) as “South Asia.” They have led to a long and fruitful relationship with the journal History and Theory, and to courses like “Yoga: a Global History” (HIST 167), “The Raj: Britain and India” (HIST 186), and “The Historian as Detective” (HIST 200).
Another area that draws my attention is the history of espionage, intelligence gathering, and knowledge formation, especially in Asia. I regularly teach a seminar on these themes (“The Great Game” [HIST 317]) and I am contemplating a book on the topic–a kind of multigenerational family memoir.
Meanwhile, my current research examines agrarian revolutionaries in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh (the land of the Buddha), especially during the 1930s and ’40s. I explore these and Indic revolutionary agency more broadly in my “Political Ascetics” seminar (HIST 314).
I have published three books—From Mutiny to Revolt: Women and the Beginning of 1857 (2025), Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (2006), and Peasants and Monks in British India (1996)—and numerous articles and book chapters. I enjoy examining literary sources, one result of which is a forthcoming volume entitled In Praise of a Yogi King (2026), a joint translation (with Dalpat Rajpurohit and the late Allison Busch) of Padmakar’s 1792 poem Himmatbahādur Vīrudāvali about the victory of the warrior ascetic Anupgiri Gosain over the Rajput Arjun Singh at Ajaygarh in eastern Bundelkhand.
I was born in New Delhi and raised mostly in India, Pakistan, and Virginia. Most of my higher education occurred at the University of Virginia, where I studied with the pioneering historian of peasant movements, Walter Hauser–in whose honor I edited a festschrift volume, Speaking of Peasants (2008). While in Charlottesville I spent my grad school summers working in the gardens and grounds at nearby Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson. In 1991 I joined the Department of History at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.
You can learn more about my research here. For information on my teaching, click here. And an abbreviated CV is available here.