About Me

Personal is political

The rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi in 2012, the Nirbhaya incident,  was my wake up call, because it came with a dual acknowledgement. One that I could have been that girl. And two that I was not facing sexual harassment in public spaces alone. As an undergraduate student then, I pivoted to studying gendered questions. After my MA in development studies, I went on to do a fellowship in urban studies from the Indian Institute for Human Settlements where I really found my voice. Following that, I worked as a fact checker during the last national elections to contribute towards the fight against misinformation. After the election, I started working for an NGO that advocates for better public and non-motorised transportation in cities. Getting involved with feminist collectives in India taught me to be creative and put the needs of the community at the center of any research or advocacy efforts. As an active voice working on issues of gender equality, safety, and urban spaces in India, I collaborated with some fantastic people to make films about how home and livelihoods are integrated for women in Chennai, conducted policy gap assessment on child-friendly cities in Maharashtra, wrote about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected urban women’s mobility, advocated for the women and child welfare ministry to be involved in urban planning, and worked to create safer cities for all people. In my quest for locally responsive and creative research methods, I worked with quantitative data, mapping, ethnographies and film making to better understand Indian cities. I struggled with being in this space, of working to improve urban spaces, without fully understanding what cities, infrastructures and transportation mean to women. And so, I decided to come back into academia, to find a place to learn more, and understand better. I acknowledge that the academy is not perfect either and so, I want to push it towards inclusivity, representation and decentering of knowledge hegemonies. I want to shift the forms and formats of academic research, write feminist theory from the global south, instead of trying to plan the city of Hyderabad on the ideals on New York. I want to push the boundaries of what counts as academic knowledge and center lived experiences and stories told by women to each other in the theory. I don’t think any of this will be an easy task, but I do this for all the women, whose voices we will never hear in the academy, unless one of their sisters writes about them.