Humanities and Languages

Aparajith is a historian of science, technology and industry in South Asia. He is the author of The Birth of an Indian Profession: Engineers, Industry, and the State, 1900-47 (Oxford University Press, 2017), which explores how the roles, organisation and work culture of engineers in the subcontinent were transformed during the politically tumultuous interwar years. Aparajith also writes on history and other topics for a general audience. His articles have appeared in the Hindu, Scroll, The Wire, thREAD, and the New Indian Express.

Aparajith studied electrical engineering at BITS Pilani before doing his postgraduate work in the history of science, medicine and technology at Oxford University (MSc) and Imperial College London (PhD). From 2013-17 he was Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode. He has been a Liverpool India Fellow at the University of Liverpool (March-June 2017), a Charles Wallace grant awardee (2014), an an International Scholar of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) (2015-16), and a Sangam House Writing Fellow (2020). In 2018, he received the Young Historian of Science Award from the Indian National Science Academy.

At Ahmedabad University, Aparajith Ramnath holds a joint appointment in the School of Arts and Sciences and the Amrut Mody School of Management.

Aparajith 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.

Aparajith'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

• 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 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.

Aparajith has taught or is teaching the following courses:

• Science, Technology and the Making of the Modern World
• Industrialisation: Perspectives from World History
• Ahmedabad as a Gateway to the World (co-taught)
• Scenes from the History of Science: Communicating scientific ideas through comics (co-taught)
• Social Transformations of India

Aparajith Ramnath, 'Reservoir Gods', in FiftyTwo.in (17 Sep 2021).

Aparajith's articles in The Wire.
Op-ed in The Hindu.
Articles in Scroll.