Up-country Tamils are descendents of Hindu migrants from South India who came to Sri Lanka between the 1830's and 1930's to work on coffee, rubber and tea plantations.  In my research, I analyze how this marginalized community has developed a distinct ethnic identity for itself in the contexts of Sri Lanka's often violent ethnic politics.  Today a vast majority of up-country Tamils still live and work on tea plantations, located in the he central highlands, or up-country, of Sri Lanka. 

I examine the interplay of ethnic, religious and national identities, and how minority communities in nations beset by violence try to get their voices heard above the din.  I am concerned with how immigrant and diaspora groups make homes for themselves in their new homelands and how they relate to their ancestral homeland.  I focus on these groups' self-conscious formulations of culture in processes of defining and refining community identity.  I explore how culture and heritage are used in Sri Lanka's violent ethnic politics to claim belonging and citizenship, and to deny others the same, a hallmark of ethnogenesis among minority and diasporic groups.  My research situates Sri Lanka within the deep history of South Asian diasporas and of globalization during the expansion of the plantation economy under the British empire.

Teaching
The Religious Experience, Culture and Society, Anthropology of Global Popular Culture, Indian Civilization, History of Modern India, Anthropology of Religion, Introduction of Religion and Culture, World Religions, Religions of India, Interpreting Others' Lives, World Ethnographies, Myth, Ritual and Mysticism, Folk Religions of Asia, Introduction to Anthropology, Introduction to Buddhism

Research
Social/Cultural and Historical Anthropology, Ethnicity, Diaspora, Religion, Identity, Culture, Globalization, Hinduism, Buddhism, Space, Gender, Popular Culture, Media, Labor, South Asia, primarily Sri Lanka and South India.

Selected Publications
"Paper Tigers on the Prowl: Rumors, Violence and Agency in the Up-country of Sri Lanka," Anthropological Quarterly 81 (1): 223-250, 2008.

"A Diaspora Next Door:  Up-Country Tamils in Sri Lanka," in Indentureship to Globalisation:  New Perspectives on the Indian Diaspora, Radica Mahase & Jerome Teelucksingh, eds. Gainesville:  University Press of Florida. 2008.

"Making Sense of the Census:  Up-country Tamils and the Contours of Tamil Nationalism," in Pathways of Dissent: Tamil Nationalism in Sri Lanka, R. Cheran. ed. New Delhi: Safe, 2008.

Of Tea and Tigers: Up-country Tamils in and beyond Sri Lanka (manuscript in progress)