From Hydro to Fossil Fuel: Energy Transitions, Agrarian Democracy, and Environmental Pollution in South India, c.1940 -1980

Aditya Ramesh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History in UW. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Human Settlements in Bengaluru. He completed his doctoral study at SOAS. His work  revolves largely around environmental history, agrarian history, and the history of science, technology, and medicine in South Asia. His current book project is titled Undercurrents: Dam, Delta, and the Making of a Regional Economy in South India, tells the story of British India’s first multipurpose reservoir on the Cauvery River. Tracing the history of the river across famines, the Great Depression, and two World Wars, the book reveals how these global events were imbricated in the politics around river water, amongst federated states, caste groups, landholder associations, and newly emergent democratic structures. Some of this work has been collective, and over the years he has helped build a ‘Cauvery Delta group’, with researchers worldwide, with a base at the French Institute of Pondicherry.  His future work focuses on an urban history of the city of Madras, one of the first colonial outposts in South Asia, and he has published some of this research in Journal of Urban History. 

*This talk is also part of Stanford Global Studies' Imperial Environments Workshop.