I am a British Academy Newton International Fellow in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh since March 2022. Before arriving in Edinburgh, I was a guest lecturer at the Department of History of Delhi University in India teaching courses on Islamic history, eighteenth-century India, and Central Asian kingdoms. I was also a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ (ICAS: MP). I completed my M.Phil. at the Department of History, University of Delhi in 2015 and subsequently joined the Jamia Millia Islamia University to do my PhD in history.My research focuses on social, religious, labour, gender, and anti-colonial resistance histories during early modern and modern Indian times. My M.Phil. and PhD research studied the ant-colonial Indian revolt of 1857 from various hitherto neglected angles and brought Persian, Urdu, and English sources together. While M.Phil. explored the perspective of the educated middle class by studying two Urdu weekly newspapers from Delhi and Lucknow (Dehli Urdu Akhbar and Tilism-e Lucknow), PhD research investigated rebels’ political vision by analysing their views on governance, modes and methods of mobilization and concept of a future state.My current project investigates the world of domestic servants during pre-colonial and colonial north India through the case study of Awadh (a region in modern Uttar Pradesh). It builds upon my last project at ICAS:MP which investigated the history of female workers and examined various occupations available to them in the Nawabi Awadh state. This study focuses primarily on domestic servants and stretches to include female, male as well as eunuch servants employed in the royal and elite households of Awadh. It explores the social and economic lives of these servants and compares it with their peers’ lives in British colonial households. Investigating the changes and continuities in master-servant relations from one set of houses to another, the project attempts to map servants’ treatment, wages, work conditions, occupational (im)mobility etc., in two different household settings. It also explores the historical (colonial) genesis of the present-day negative labels and values attached to the domestic servants and their jobs.