I am a social and intellectual historian of mathematics and astronomy in South Asia. I obtained my PhD in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in August 2021. My work is about the relationship between local and global time scales during British colonial rule in India, and the ways in which labour and caste relationships direct and change them.

The Time There: Colonial Rule and the Exact Sciences in India

My book manuscript, The Time There: Colonial Rule and the Exact Sciences in India tries to show that part of the early story of deep time has to do with attempts to solve problems created by the encounter with other cosmologies. Making use of Indian-language primary sources like almanacs and scientific texts, I follow this story in India from the late eighteenth century---tracing shifting interpretations drawn from Brahmin interlocutors, Sanskrit texts, and material artifacts like observatories--- to the early twentieth century, when notions of environmental change in deep time were harnessed for histories of racial origins by British scientists and Indian nationalists alike.

contact: prashant.kumar@hu-berlin.de