My book-length research, Reclaimed Lands: Soil, Speculation and the History of Making Land in Mumbai, excavates the centuries-long history of reclaimed land in Mumbai. Over four chapters, the book traces the transformations integral to making land from the sea starting in the eighteenth century, when shallow seas first became wastelands, then agricultural land, and finally developable urban plots and property. These transformations were not linear processes. They were part of overlapping practices and systems that involved labor, capital, legislative devices, local entrepreneurship, financial innovations, and environmental destruction. In tracing these transformations, the research unravels the often magical way land reclamation is spoken about, with narratives that move quickly from water to dry ground. The book ultimately situates Mumbai’s sinking coasts and its insatiable need for sea-facing land and infrastructure within a longer historical arc spanning centuries of land reclamation. 

The book manuscript is in-progress.

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The project won the Graham Foundation Grant for Research and the New Faculty Research Grant at the University of Houston in 2023. Excerpts of this research appeared in Instituting Worlds: Architecture and Islands (published by Routledge and edited by Marko Jobst and Catherina Gabrielsson, 2024). Parts of the research have been presented at many venues and conferences. I presented at the Center for South Asia, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison (2025), Buell Center at Columbia University for the "Made Land" set of talks (2023), Annual Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) conference in Montreal (2023), and the Annual Urban History Association (UHA) Conference in Pittsburgh (2023). In the next few weeks, I will be presenting a part of this research at the University of Pennsylvania in March 2026 at the Coastal Worlds: A Conference & Exhibition.