S. Prashant Kumar is a social and intellectual historian of science and empire, whose work examines the intersections between mathematics, astronomy, technology, and race. His current book project, The Light Threshers: Time, Caste, and Computational Labor in South Asia, is a history of the production and distribution of time, from the late eighteenth century to the early years of independence in the mid-twentieth century. Kumar traces how forms of labor organized by caste and religion—from jyotihśāstra [Sanskrit astral science] to artisanal metallurgy—were transformed and incorporated into a global system of time measurement and scientific observation. The book’s central argument is that the production of time required the creation of an infrastructure for the processing of light. But the writing machine assembled to produce time from light also set up a dialectic between chronometry and historical chronology, one with far reaching consequences for the kinds of temporality inherited by the postcolonial state.

He is also an Honorary Fellow at the Archives at NCBS, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru, a collecting center for the history of science in modern India. Prior to joining the IFK, he was a Research Scholar at the Archives at NCBS, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore; a Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Intellectual History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; and a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Haverford College. Kumar received his PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania in August 2021.

PUBLICATIONS

S. Prashant Kumar “The instrumental Brahmin and the “half-caste” computer: Astronomy and colonial rule in Madras, 1791–1835.” History of Science 61.3 (2023): 308-337. https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221090435