Sujeet George is a historian of modern South Asia whose research lies at the intersection between agriculture, technology and governance. He has a PhD in History from ETH Zurich (2022). Aligned with his interest in the histories of life sciences in South Asia and the public and material lives of scientific practice, he is currently co-curating an exhibition that is funded by the India Foundation for the Arts. Sleepwalker Archives imagines and situates the photo-archival and herbarium collections at the French Institute in Pondicherry in an age of ecological loss, material decay, and extinction.
Areas of Research Interest
- Modern South Asia
- History of Science and Technology
- Digital Humanities
Ongoing Research Projects
Dilemmas of Scientific Agriculture in South Asia (1890–1950)
I am at present revising my dissertation into a book manuscript that charts the development of agricultural sciences in modern South Asia. The book project examines this story across three interlinked axes, namely, the emergence of a post-Mendelian theory and practice of agriculture, the reordering of the global agrarian economy after World War I, and the formulation of agrarian and food policies emerging from the anti-colonial movement. Agricultural modernization in the Global South is typically associated with post-colonial food scarcity, miracle seeds, American technical expertise, and the politics of the Cold War. The picture, however, was markedly different at the beginning of the twentieth century when the logic of European imperialism undergirded the global agrarian economy. Large sections of Asia and Africa were under European rule who controlled colonial economies through a regime of cultivating stipulations, manufacturing barriers, and trade protectionism. My research argues that the transformation of the agrarian economy in British India in the first half of the twentieth century was brought about through a reworking of the relationship between science, the colonial state and the local environment.
Indigenous Ecologies: Nature Conservation and the Politics of Tribal Representation in South Asia (c. 1930–2000)
I am also developing a new postdoc project on indigenous ecologies that examines the co-constitutive histories of the development of the ideas of indigeneity, ecology, and politico-territorial sovereignty in modern South Asia. While caste has classically been understood as the primary mode of social stratification in Indian society, the idea of the ‘primitive’ and of the indigenous has had a more contentious definitional legacy. In postcolonial India, the discourse of affirmative action has tended to coalesce the social marginalization and political underrepresentation of historically disenfranchised caste groups and Scheduled Tribes. Characterized as adivasis—the original inhabitants of the land—the rationalizations undergirding the classificatory mechanisms inscribed on these groups have imbibed the legacies of colonial anthropology, twentieth-century science and environmental policy, as well as the aspirations and anxieties of postcolonial nation-building. Indigenous Ecologies explores the dialectical relationship between nature and nativeness, between the indigenous and the international, and the increased reliance on technoscience to solve longer-term problems of food production and loss of biodiversity.
Publications
Fischer-Tiné, Harald, George, Sujeet and Slate, Nico. 2022. ‘Introduction: Religion, Politics, and Development ― Mapping the Sites and Domains of Indo-American Exchange, c. 1850–1970’, in The United States and South Asia from the Age of Empire to Decolonization, pp. 7-24. Leiden University Press.
George, Sujeet. 2022. ‘Constructing an Indian Sociology: ‘Karimpur’, U.S. Area Studies and Cold War Social Science’, in The United States and South Asia from the Age of Empire to Decolonization, pp. 189-214. Leiden University Press.