Roy is an anthropologist and urban practitioner from Neyveli, Tamil Nadu. He completed his MSc in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford in 2025 and will be shortly beginning a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.
On his doctoral project, Roy writes: "I am excited to join the South Asian Regional Studies PhD Program at University of Pennsylvania, as a recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Fellowship. My doctoral research focuses on the complexities between Caste, religion, conversion and law in Modern South Asia. Focusing on Dalit Christian communities in Tamil Nadu, I will be examining how Dalit political subjectivities and activism are shaped through socio-legal exclusion, non-naming, and legal misrecognition. I will be conducting fieldwork in Tamil Nadu, specifically on the church festivals, processions, and caste conflicts that occur around these events. Through ethnography and archival research, I hope to understand how "doubly minoritised" groups negotiate their identity in response to the judiciary, the church, and the state in Contemporary India.”
