My first book Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India (Harvard and Permanent Black, 2011) traces the politics of Punjabi Hindus in the first half of the twentieth century. A religiously defined minority in undivided Punjab, these Hindus aligned themselves with Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs during various anticolonial national movements even as they simultaneously inched eastward, towards the rest of Hindu-majority India, styling themselves 'communalists' and their politics 'communal'. I study their politics, mark their particular motivations, and account for the suddenness with which Partition and Partition violence struck - both in history and in memory. I also raise and answer the troubling, seemingly eternal question: was Partition inevitable? 

I am currently working on a book manuscript with the working title: Hurt Sentiments and State Ideology in South Asia, which is to be published by Harvard University Press. Through a history of foundational moments such as the Gandhi Murder Trial, the lawsuits against secular forces during the mobilization in Ayodhya, the enduring significance of the Objectives Resolution in the three constitutions of Pakistan, and debates on the meaning of 'Islamic state' and 'secularism' in Pakistan and Bangladesh, I examine the shaping of state ideologies by "hurt sentiments" in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In the process, I ask what it has meant for India to be a secular republic, for Pakistan to be an Islamic republic, and for Bangladesh to be a secular republic that also enshrines Islam as the state religion.

I am also working on a coursebook titled India's Partition: Politics, Culture, Memory that has been commissioned by Cambridge University Press. This is based on courses on Partition that I have regularly taught at the University of Virginia. 

My other interests lie in the fields of India-Pakistan relations, foreign policy, education policy, memory studies, and oral history.