George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Prakash Kumar is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He received his PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2004. He spent two years as a postdoc at Yale University’s History Department, followed by a tenure at Colorado State University and joined Penn State in 2014.

Kumar specializes in the fields of South Asian history and history of science, technology, and public health. His scholarship interrogates the nature of development and modernization in agricultural and rural societies on the one hand and in domains of disease and public health on the other hand, at the nexus of relationships between South Asia and the world. His first book, Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), narrates a global history of plant indigo that captured the unique moment of 1899 when a cheaper and purer synthetic indigo produced in the factories first challenged agricultural indigo produced through an agricultural system. The book explores flows of knowledge and skill among global plantation systems and the contingent impact of colonial labor and anticolonial, nationalist movement on the efforts to improve agricultural indigo.

His second book project (completed), A History of the Green Revolution in India, unpacks the nation’s embrace of a practice of productive agriculture around high yielding variety seeds (or HYVs) in 1964-66 that were developed by Rockefeller’s breeders. Kumar places this history in the regional context of north India’s flood plains that were subjected to successive efforts to build productivity since the colonial times. The book pits agroecology and developmentalism in mutuality in these regions amidst efforts made by the sovereign state to seek self-sufficiency and build food security. The narrative analyzes colonial era science for crop development, post-colonial efforts to build productive communities, clearing of Himalayan Tarai and their settlement with refugees post-partition, and the effort to connect peasant proprietors to the market. These efforts in building an efficacious agriculture also erased alternate visions and livelihoods, as they prepared the groundwork for the arrival of HYVs.

Kumar’s current research, tentatively titled, Healthy Bodies, interrogates the multiple and varied historical “constructs” of disease as threatening the very existence of state and society in colonial and postcolonial India. These constructs opened the way for states, American foundations, and global actors to act on the bodies of subjects and citizens. He has now worked for 3 years on this project, assembling archives from colonial records, American foundations, and institutional papers in India and abroad. This third book is developing as a case study of state and community efforts around four diseases and the associated population control measures.

Recent Publications:

“ICRISAT: US-India Entanglements and Post-colonial Imaginings in India,” In Helen Anne Curry and Timothy Lorek, (eds.), Research as Development: Historical Perspectives on Agricultural Science and International Aid in the CGIAR Era. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.