Humanities and Languages

Aparajith Ramnath is an award-winning historian of science, technology, and business. He is the author of two books: Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya (1861–1962) (Penguin/Viking, 2024), a biographical study of an iconic engineer and public intellectual who played a key role in modern Indian history; and The Birth of an Indian Profession: Engineers, Industry, and the State, 1900–47 (Oxford University Press, 2017), a pioneering history of engineers in late-colonial India. He has also produced several research papers and book chapters, and written for Scroll, The Wire, The Hindu, and FiftyTwo.in.

Professor Ramnath was initially trained as an electrical engineer at BITS Pilani, and later as a historian of science and technology at Oxford University and Imperial College London. He has been an International Scholar of the Society for the History of Technology, a Charles Wallace India Trust grant awardee, a Sangam House writing fellow, and a recipient of the Young Historian of Science Award (2018) from the Indian National Science Academy.

Aparajith Ramnath specialises in the history of science and technology in South Asia, and in particular the history of engineers. He also works on the history of business, especially industrial enterprises, in India.

Professor Ramnath's research is guided by three concerns. First, he aims to study the history of technology not just to understand technology, but to throw light on larger historical questions. Second, he is interested not only in the discourse around science and technology but also in the working and professional lives of scientific and technical practitioners. Third, he pays particular attention to transnational linkages and flows in experts, knowledge and materials.
 

Book

• Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya (1861–1962) (Gurugram: Penguin/Viking, 2024).
• The Birth of an Indian Profession: Engineers, Industry, and the State, 1900-47 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Journal articles

• [With Neveen Abdelrehim, Andrew Smith, and Andrew Popp]. ‘Ambiguous Decolonisation: a postcolonial reading of the IHRM strategy of the Burmah Oil Company’, Business History, 63, 1 (2021): 98-126.
• ‘International Networks and Aircraft Manufacture in Colonial and Postcolonial India: States, Entrepreneurs and Educational Institutions, 1940-64’, Journal of Research Institute for the History of Global Arms Transfer, 9 (2020): 41-59.
• ‘The Emergence of Engineering as a Profession in Modern India’, Indian Journal of History of Science, 53, 4 (2018): T205-T210.
• ‘“Indigenous Knowledge” and “Science” in the Age of Globalization’, IIM Kozhikode Society & Management Review, 3, 1 (2014): 101-7.

Book chapters

• [with Amy Sue Bix, Christine Winberg, Aive Pevkur, and Eddie Conlon] ‘The Historically Global Forming of Engineering Education’ in Aditya Johri (ed.), International Handbook of Engineering Education Research (New York: Routledge, 2023), pp. 9-29.
• ‘La controverse du pont de Howrah: Expertise technique et enjeux sociaux et politiques en Inde à la fin de l’ère coloniale’ [Translated from the English by Christine Vivier] in Charles Gadea and Roland Lardinois (eds.), Les Mondes de l’ingénieur en Inde (XIXe-XXIe siècle) (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022), pp. 75-97.

Book reviews

• ‘Review of Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism, and Transhumanism in South Indian Science by Robert Geraci’, Technology and Culture, 62, 1 (2021): 311-12.
• ‘Book review: Ross Bassett, The Technological Indian’, Studies in History, 34, 2 (2018): 212-215.

Professor Ramnath has taught or is teaching the following courses:

• HST320 Science and Technology in Independent India
• HST220 Science, Technology and the Making of the Modern World
• HST205 Industrialisation: Perspectives from World History
• HST101 Ahmedabad as a Gateway to the World (co-taught)
• MGT503 Social Transformations of India
• FDP102 Environment and Climate Change (Foundation Programme studio; co-taught)
• Scenes from the History of Science: Communicating scientific ideas through comics (co-taught) (Independent Study Period)

'How did the Howrah Bridge get its iconic design?', The Hindu (online), 3 Feb 2023.

'Reservoir Gods', in FiftyTwo.in, 17 Sep 2021.

Articles in The Wire.
Op-ed in The Hindu.
Articles in Scroll.