I am a Commonwealth Split-site scholar at King’s College London and a PhD Scholar at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. My research examines the early transitions between the spoken, written, and printed word to understand how the printed book was introduced and reading practices emerged in the newly literate societies of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Malayalam-speaking regions of Kerala. Engaging with missionary print ventures across South Asia and the colonised worlds through visual and literary archives, my thesis explores sites of print production, reading aloud practices, and the institutionalisation of reading spaces, developing a social history of reading before the rise of silent reading publics.My broader research interests include print culture, book history, literacy, translation, and pedagogy at the intersections of literary and social history in the Global South. I have been a Visiting Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin's Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities" and a recipient of the Inlaks Research and Travel Grant.

This research is supervised by Professor Udaya Kumar (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi) and Professor Javed Majeed (Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, King's College London).