Keywords: dance; historiography; de/anti-colonial performance; feminism; activism; South Asia; India; Bengal.

I joined Royal Holloway’s Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance in September 2015. Prior to my doctoral studies and academic career in the United Kingdom, I studied English Literature (BA and MA) and Cultural Studies in India. My academic background is interdisciplinary and my teaching and research thrives on the intersections of dance studies, performance studies, history, cultural studies and critical theories on race, gender and sexuality. 

My monograph Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism was published in the Palgrave Macmillan New World Choreographies Series in 2014. It subsequently won the 2015 de la Torre Bueno Prize, and the 2015 Outstanding Publication Award from the Dance Studies Association (USA). Articles and papers have appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as Economic and Political Weekly, Contemporary Theatre Review, Dance Research Journal, Theatre Research International, Performance Research, Asian Theatre Journal, South Asian Diaspora, South Asia Research, Studies in South Asian Film and Media and CLIO:Women, Gender, History. Essays have also appeared in scholarly volumes by Bloomsbury (Companion to Dance Studies, 2019) and Routledge (Dance Matters Too, 2018; Re-Thinking Dance History, 2017). My second monograph, funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme grant, is titled The Archives and Afterlives of Nautch Dancers in India (2025), and published by Cambridge University Press in its Studies in Modern Theatre series. I am also co-editor (with Anurima Banerji) of The Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance (2025), published by Oxford University Press-New York. 

I am the Principal Investigator of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded grant titled 'South Asian Dance Equity: The Arts that British South Asian Dance Ignores' (2023-25). Along with Co-Investigators Royona Mitra (Brunel University of London) and Anusha Kedhar (University of California Riverside), the project works with several UK dance agencies to map barriers to equitable participation and access for South Asian minoritised groups.  

Elected service to the field includes Executive Committee member of IFTR (2015-2019), the Board of Directors of Dance Studies Association (2018-2022) and Co-Convening the Choreography and Corporeality Working Group at IFTR (2017-2022).

I have supervised PhD projects on AR/VR choreography and EU migration; music education in South Asia; Malay dances/identities in Singapore;  theatre in colonial/postcolonial Sri Lanka; and choral/ritual dances in Greek theatre. 

I am interested in supervising projects focused on performance practices from South Asia; British Asian theatre/dance theatre; performance-focused visual art practices (e.g. exhibitions, reenactments); de/anticoloniality; performance activism and social justice; embodied histories/historiography; and minoritised performance cultures.