Prakash Kumar is an Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He received his PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2004. He spent two years as a postdoc at Yale University’s History Department, and was an Assistant and Associate Professor at Colorado State, before joining Penn State in 2014.

He is the author of Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), which is a social history around indigo that intersects with colonial and nationalist currents in South Asia, while also remaining attentive to the global surroundings of this history. The book tracks the odyssey of indigo from its African/Caribbean beginnings, through the Carolinas and the Spanish colonial world, before exploring in detail its journey among the colonial plantations on the Indian subcontinent.

He is currently working on two monographs on agrarian and rural history in India. The first, India’s Green Revolution: A New History, is nearing completion and captures the transformative experience of India’s agrarian modernization in the twentieth century. This is a monograph on the history of rural and agrarian modernization in colonial and postcolonial India that grounds India’s rural and agrarian change in colonial history, the Cold War context, and post-colonial development. The book argues that the “new strategy” in agriculture or the “green revolution” built on a longer project of rural and agrarian modernization going back to the colonial era. It explores the pervasive presence of American agrarian ideals on both sides of the independence divide in India at centers like Allahabad Agricultural Institute, in establishment of agricultural universities, the launch of community development projects, creation of knowledge communities, and in the expansion of agriculture around high yielding variety seeds. A history of modernization and its contested legacy, the book examines the massive engagement of American actors with postcolonial elites and interactions between modernization as a social ideology of distinct import and the postcolonial project of development.  The book explores US/India entanglements across expert visions and in the nature of similar yet divergent agrarian politics in the states of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.  Kumar’s second book, which is under contract with Indiana University Press, discusses contemporary movements in India that oppose the entry of GMOs.

Recent Publications:

“ICRISAT: US-India Entanglements and Post-colonial Imaginings in India,” In Helen Anne Curry and Timothy Lorek, (eds.), Research as Development: Historical Perspectives on Agricultural Science and International Aid in the CGIAR Era. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.