I am a political and social anthropologist whose research examines how institutions produce and govern social inequality through the intersecting dynamics of caste, religion, environmental change, and development. My work brings political anthropology, Critical Caste Studies, political ecology, and the anthropology of governance into conversation to understand how states, bureaucracies, legal systems, and development interventions shape political recognition, citizenship, and democratic futures.
I am currently a Georg Forster Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich, where I investigate caste-based discrimination in Pakistan, its institutional invisibility, and its implications for social justice and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. I also serve as Visiting Lecturer at LMU Munich and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bahria University, Islamabad.
My scholarship challenges the widespread assumption that caste is absent from Muslim societies. Through long-term ethnographic research in Pakistan, I demonstrate how caste operates across religious communities and is reproduced through agrarian relations, bureaucratic governance, environmental inequalities, labour regimes, and political institutions. More broadly, my research explores political Islam, political Sufism, secular Sufism, Pasmanda politics, environmental justice, climate governance, democratic participation, and the anthropology of the state.
I am the author of Architecture of Caste in Pakistan (Routledge, 2026) and Secular Sufism and the Politics of Difference in Pakistan (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming). My research has appeared in leading international journals, including Journal of Asian and African Studies, Critical Sociology, Interventions, Religions of South Asia, Contemporary Voice of Dalit, and Religions. I have also contributed to Brill’s Encyclopedia of the Religions of the Indigenous People of South Asia.
Beyond research, I actively engage with public policy, higher education, and civil society through academic collaborations, public lectures, policy consultations, editorial work, and open-access digital archives. My work has informed parliamentary discussions, public debates, and media coverage on caste, religious minorities, environmental justice, and democratic inclusion in Pakistan.
Across my research, teaching, and public engagement, I seek to develop comparative anthropological perspectives on inequality, governance, and social transformation while contributing to broader debates on democracy, decolonization, and justice in South Asia and beyond.