Pranav Mohan

PhD title: Parting Ways with the Metropole: Colonial Sites of Natural History Research in Company Calcutta as Incongruous and Parallel ‘Centres of Calculation’, 1784-1857

My research intends to locate colonial Calcutta, a peripheral site in the British Empire, as a diverging, incongruent parallel ‘centre of calculation’. ‘Centres of Calculation’ is the sociological model used by Bruno Latour (2003) to explain how European metropoles like London and Paris accumulate data from the world over via their colonial networks, refine their own pre-existing ideas, and accumulate further with this hindsight to claim universality to their ideas alone. On the contrary, the study would explicate how scientific institutions and journals in early colonial Calcutta (1784-1857) acted as non-congruent parallel centres of natural history research to those in London. Though their interests, objectives and enquiries sometimes converge, they often do diverge, resulting in multiple/different meanings for objects collected and studied. Natural history emerging out of these spaces had to simultaneously accommodate the demands of colonial political elites and native interlocutors to take shape, often in contraposition to metropolitan models.

1st Supervisor: Dr. Chris Manias

2nd Supervisor: Prof. Jon Wilson

Bio:

Having received a Master’s degree in History from the University of Hyderabad, India, I was one of the very few fortunate ones to actually join and graduate with an MPhil programme amidst the two Covid-19 lockdowns before the Higher education system in India decided to end the MPhil programs for good. At the University of Calicut, my MPhil dissertation looked at how the career and travel-surveys of Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, a Scottish naturalist employed by the English East India Company admin in Calcutta, evidences the inextricable networks between natural history and colonial state building. It also highlighted the contextual nature of colonial gaze in the early colonial surveys of the 18thand early 19th centuries that serves the immediate and contextual needs of the company state than fix a universal orientalist image for the entire socio-physical landscape scrutinized.

As an aspiring STS researcher, the answers that I seek are to simple questions: why and how are historically only some knowledges universal and others local, some ‘facts’ and others mere ‘beliefs’?

Publications:

Restoring ‘Adam’s Empire’: Lockean Colonial Property and 'Statistical'-Bureaucratic Reports in Early Colonial Malabar, 1792-1805. Journal of the South Indian History Congress. Vol. I, pp. 4551-4563. Dindigul: South Indian History Congress, 2023. www.journal.southindianhistorycongress.org/show_article.php?atl_id=NDMz

Papers Given:

‘Baconian Empiricism to ‘Hindumania’: Dr. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, Colonial Disillusionment, and the Rejection of European Sciences’ at the Britain and the World Conference, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, on April 22, 2023.

‘Resistive Texts: Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn as a Decolonial Reflex to the Coloniality of Os Lusíadas’ at the Cambridge Oceanic and Maritime History Workshop, Cambridge University, UK, March 3, 2023.

Research Grants, Awards, and Prizes:

Hans Rausing Scholarship at CHoSTM (“+3 award”) 2024.

Kasturi Misra Memorial Young Historian Award 2022: Best Research Paper at the 41st Annual South Indian History Congress, held at G.T.N Arts College, Dindigul, India.