I am on sabbatical-leave this year (2025-26) and am mostly in India doing research for a book on agrarian revolutionaries and their religious and philosophical mindscapes in the Hindi heartland of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, especially during the 1930s and ’40s. The central figure in this work is the Hindu-Marxist Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, who died suddenly in 1950 after a meteoric career as India’s premier kisān (peasant) leader. I’m interested as well in the Swami’s celebrated Buddhist-Marxist “comrades,” Nagarjun and Rahul Sankrityayan, but also in the largely unheralded work of lesser-known figures like Mahant Dhanrajpuri, Banke Bihari Mishra, Brahmachari Ramvriksh, and Kedarmani Shukl. The story of the peasant movement is not complete without a history of the Swami’s ashram and archive in Bihta, Bihar.
My most recent published work is From Mutiny to Revolt: Women and the Beginning of 1857 (Cambridge 2025), a study of the social and emotional world of Indian soldiers in the Bengal army (the “Company Fauj“) in mid-nineteenth-century north India, beginning with the tumultuous events of April and May 1857 in Meerut.
Meanwhile in 2025 Dalpat Rajpurohit and I finished revisions to a joint translation of the Himmatbahādur Vīrdāvalī by Padmākar, a long eighteenth-century Hindi (Brajbhāṣā) poem celebrating a 1792 victory by the warlord Anūpgirī Gosāīṃ, a.k.a. “Himmat Bahādur” (d. 1804). This is forthcoming in 2026 and is dedicated to the memory of Allison Busch, with whom we began this work in 2009. We continue to work on a much longer contemporaneous poem entitled Anūpaprakāśa by Mān Kavī, describing Anūpgirī’s entire career–beginning with the kindling of a martial yogic spirit in the heart of his guru, Rājendragirī.
My earlier books include Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; paperback edition, 2012) and Peasants and Monks in British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996; Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, 1999). These works reflect my long-standing interest in the social, intellectual, and military dimensions of Hindu asceticism.
I have also edited two volumes–one a festschrift for my graduate school guru, Walter Hauser, entitled Speaking of Peasants (New Delhi: Manohar, 2008); the other a co-edited theme issue for the journal History and Theory, entitled History and Theory in a Global Frame (December 2015).
Some recent and forthcoming articles include:
- “Killing Ascetics: Yogis, Sufis, and the Raj,” in David Gilmartin, Prasannan Parthasarathi, and Mrinalini Sinha (eds.), Cambridge History of the Indian Subcontinent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026), approx. 20 pp.
- “Panipat Remembered: Before the Fort of Kalinjar, August 23, 1803,” in Peter Gottschalk (ed.), Hindu, Muslim, and the Dynamics of South Asian Identity: Belonging and Conflict from the Past to the Present (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), 43-56.
- “History and Hindi Film,” in Kim Nelson, Mia Treacey, and Marnie Hughes-Warrington (eds.), A Companion to History and Film (New York: Routledge, 2023), 176-193.
- “Who Killed Arjun Singh? Poetry and History in Bundelkhand,” in Manan Ahmed (ed.), “Circuits of Culture in Early Modern South Asia: Essays in Honor of Allison Busch,” special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 42, 2 (August 2022), pp. 370-380
- “Rajo guṇa: Sovereignty and the Self in India,” in Dilip Menon (ed.), Concepts in the Global South (New York, London, New Delhi: Routledge, 2022), pp. 151-166
- “Blown Away: The Prelude to Buxar, 1764,” in Kathinka Sinha Kerkhoff, Neeraj Kumar, and Sunita Lall (eds.), Coming of Age in Bihar: Readings in Social Sciences (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2020), pp. 237-253
- “The Yogi’s Way of War,” in Robert Antony, Stuart Carroll, and Caroline Dodds Pennock (eds.), Philip Dwyer (gen. ed.), The Cambridge World History of Violence, vol. 3, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 156-173
From 2012 to 2021 I was an associate editor of the journal History and Theory. I continue to serve as a consulting editor.
For information on my teaching, click here. For my homepage, here. An abbreviated CV is available here.
