About the Lecture: Over the course of the twentieth century, engineering grew to become one of the most aspirational professions in India. This is often understood as a consequence of colonial infrastructure projects and post-colonial ideas of nation-building.

What is less often discussed is the way in which these developments were connected to global historical currents. Recent scholarships have demonstrated in detail how engineering grew into a formal profession across the world between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. From the start, it was a profession that depended on global networks and the movement of experts, artefacts, and know-how, and was closely associated with empires and transnational corporations.

In this talk, Prof. Ramnath will discuss aspects of this global story and reflect on some of the continuing implications for the ways in which we imagine the role of engineering in society today.

About the Speaker: 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.