My PhD thesis titled The Life and Letters of Abdul Jalil Bilgrami: A Study of the Literary Pursuits of a Petty Official in Eighteenth Century Mughal India is a microhistorical study of the life of a low-ranking bureaucrat. Working under the supervision of Prof. Najaf Haider, I concentrate on the first three decades of the eighteenth century, intending to capture the lived experience of a commoner serving the empire in the period of administrative decline. To authentically capture such an experience, I move away from the use of conventional historical sources such as court chronicles and commissioned histories—which tend to focus exclusively on the elite—to personal letters and poetry. These literary works written in the private domain provide an excellent opportunity to visualize the very pedestrian experience of imperial decline, presenting before us an ant's-eye view. Thus, the thesis, macro-historically, aims to offer itself as a unique history of the fall of the Mughal empire.

The ideas for my thesis developed during the course of my MPhil degree for the fulfilment of which I submitted my dissertation titled, Being a Mansabdar: Norms of Civility and Issues of Identity in Mughal Lower Bureaucracy. As the titles and themes of my thesis and dissertation suggest, I have always been interested in the history of the marginal; the ones lost to time because of the apparent paucity of sources preserving their voices. Yet, such a supposed paucity needs to be and has been constantly challenged with recent historiographical developments giving people's history its rightful place in the discourse. However, such trends have also created a rigid dichotomy between the elite and the non-elite, ignoring the presence of the middle strata. 

To reassert their presence, my recently published article Revisiting the Mirzanama: Class Consciousness and the Mughal Middle Classes, The Medieval History Journal, Vol. 26, No. 1, April 2023) argues for the existence of a sufficiently distinguishable and conscious middling section in Mughal Indian society. 

As is clear from above, I specialize in literary history, microhistory and socio-cultural history.