She obtained her BA at
Osmania University in 1986, her MAs at
University of Hyderabad in 1988 and at
Kansas State University in 1991, and her PhD in Folklore and Folklife at
University of Pennsylvania in 1998; In 1999, she started working at
Duke University as Assistant Professor of Religion at the Department of Religious Studies, and he was an Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor from 2002 to 2003. She became an associate professor in 2007, In 2006, she worked on two books: as co-editor of
Gender and Story in South India and as author of
Poetics of Conduct, for which she won the 2007
American Academy of Religion Best First Book in the History of Religions Award. In 2020, she released another book,
The Audacious Raconteur. She was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023. She served as vice president of the
American Academy of Religion in 2023 and will become president in 2024, as well as the fourth Asian-American woman in the position. As of 2024, she and Baba Prasad are working as co-directors of
Let Us See, a
docufiction film on
Mahatma Gandhi's 1944 interactions with a schoolteacher. She is fluent in Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, and Telegu. ==Bibliography==