His current project, “Buddhist China in the Indian Imagination: Locating the Goddess Tara in Hindu Tantras” concerns how the originally Buddhist goddess Tara has been adapted for Hindu audiences with particular reference to a narrative trope in which Indian devotees travel to ‘Greater China’ to learn the proper manner of worshipping her. The research examines the imaginative and rhetorical construction of Buddhist ‘China’ in Sanskrit tantras as well as the process of localizing the Hindu Tara in later commentaries and ritual manuals from Eastern India. Drawing also on contemporary Bengali sources and ethnographic fieldwork, it asks how the imagined geography of the tantras interacts with local knowledge about China and the Himalayas, modern Hindu universalism, and the ongoing globalization of Buddhism driven at least in part by the Tibetan diaspora.
Other works in progress include articles on vegetarian substitutions in animal sacrifice, fanciful literary exegesis, and orientalist occultism, as well as a monograph — Raja Krishnacandra: Hindu Kingship and Myth-Making in Early Modern Bengal — exploring the accretion of legends around an eighteenth-century aristocrat famed as both a bulwark of Hindu culture and as the alleged architect of a conspiracy that birthed British colonialism in the subcontinent.