I currently work as a professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Social Research. My ongoing research deals with the appropriation of mobile technology in India and Kenya. As my previous research projects on women’s wage labour in urban India or gift giving in rural India, this project seeks to understand unexpected cultural manifestations of market economy.
I have published articles in such journals as Ethnos, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Modern Asian Studies and Contributions to Indian Sociology and Social Anthropology. I co-edited Culture, Power and Agency: Gender in Indian ethnography (Kolkata: 2006) with Lina Fruzzetti.
My latest monograph Means of Awakening: Gender, Politics and Practice in Rural India (Kolkata: Stree 2009) is an ethnographically rich study of local politics and gender in rural West Bengal, India. The book relates the study of the political domain to that of cultural practices and considers how translocal discourses facilitate local dialogue. I argue that the gendered understanding of politics not only limits women’s political participation but also enables and shapes women’s political action and critical discourses because the local concept of politics does not exclude home, kinship, and the women’s domain.
I suggest that the notions of modernity and development are not applied in local disputes because of their universality or the supremacy of the Western model of modernization, but because these, through their local interpretations, offer concepts through which the taken-for-granted practices can be discussed and questioned, which in turn become means of awakening: of turning women’s personal experiences into questions of social change.
My doctoral dissertation Secret Freedom in the City: Women’s Wage Work and Agency in Calcutta which was published by World Heritage Press (Quebeck. 2003) examined the cultural construction of work and women workers’ agency and sought to develop anthropological understanding of practice.