Speaker
We think of engineering as a story of national progress. India’s engineers: products of post-colonial ambition, symbols of a modernising nation.
The story is far older, and more global.
Recent scholarship has found that engineering grew into a formal profession across the world through empire, transnational corporations, and the movement of experts, artefacts, and know-how across borders. The colonial infrastructure projects that shaped India were not local achievements, but nodes in a global network.
In this talk, Professor Aparajith Ramnath traces that global history and asks what it means for the way we imagine engineering, and engineers, in society today.
This lecture is a part of Azim Premji University’s Public Lecture Series.
Presented by:
Speaker
Aparajith Ramnath
Aparajith Ramnath is a historian of science, technology, and business. He is the author of two books: The Birth of an Indian Profession: Engineers, Industry, and the State, 1900-47 (OUP, 2017); and Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya (1861–1962) (Penguin/Viking, 2024), which won the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize and the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism (Books (Non-Fiction)). In addition to his scholarly work, Aparajith has written for general audiences in publications such as Scroll, The Wire, The Hindu and FiftyTwo.
Aparajith was educated at BITS Pilani, Oxford University, and Imperial College London. He has been an International Scholar of the Society for the History of Technology, a Sangam House Writing Fellow, and a recipient of the Young Historian of Science Award (2018) from the Indian National Science Academy. He teaches at Ahmedabad University, where he is an Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences.
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