My Coordinates

I like to think of my life as connected points stitched together by giant oceans and flight paths – the coordinates of a child who was born into a fishing community on South Asia’s southwestern coast of Calicut, who spent a considerable part of his childhood with his expatriate parents in the Arab Gulf, and then moved past the Mediterranean and Atlantic to the hustle and bustle of London and Manhattan.

I have always conceived mobilities in directions: when I was a child, I saw the Gulf-going fathers and brothers as moving upwards in a vertical infrastructure of social and economic upliftment symbolized by planes climbing skyward. When I spent my school days in Riyadh, spatiality emerged as both horizontal and the lack of it – of horizontal ‘national’ spaces that ‘expatriates’ should not trespass, of the absence of public commons, of guided mobilities that moved in linear and regulated directions from apartments to schools to malls, pictured by Riyadh’s multi-lane highways. This sense of direction – of movement as something more than geography, as unseen routes of faith, memory, and belonging – continues to shape how I think of migration and religion as academic subjects of interest.

I received my early undergraduate training in a community religious college, Jamia Markaz, where I mostly read Shāfiʿī and Ashʿarī religious texts, along with classical Arabic. I later completed an MA in Political Science at the University of Hyderabad, graduating as a gold medalist and earning the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF). My master’s thesis examined how political narratives of class were articulated and transformed through emigration legislation within the subnational context of Kerala. I now pursue a dual MA in Islamic Studies and Muslim Cultures at Columbia University and AKU-ISMC as a fellowship student. My upcoming thesis explores how concepts of Muslim pilgrimage and migration have developed as exclusive categories amidst hegemonic frameworks of decolonization in the Third World. It draws heavily on ethnographic inputs from Malayalee Muslim migrants in Saudi Arabia – conceived as “partial societies” constituted by migrant externality – and their organization and participation in hamlas or informal pilgrimage agencies. My ethnographic fieldwork over the summer of 2025 in Saudi Arabia and Kerala has been supported by a generous grant from the Middle East Institute, Columbia University.

When I’m not writing or reading, I curate articles and podcasts at Katib webmag (katib.in), and watch movies and football. Reach me at ma4694@columbia.edu