BIOGRAPHY

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. The book 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. Previously trained in theoretical physics, Kumar received his PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania in August 2021.

PUBLICATIONS

S. Prashant Kumar, “The Temple and the Observatory: A History of Data in India, 1783–1792,” in Global Aspects of Newtonianism, ed. Derya Gürses Tarbuck, (Routledge, 2025)

S. Prashant Kumar, “Colonial Time Machines: Chronometry and the Personal Equation between Europe and South Asia,” in Astronomical Observatories and Chronometry, 18th-20th Century: Studies in Honour of Paolo Brenni, eds. Gianenrico Bernasconi, Illeana Chinnici, and Marco Storni (Springer, 2025)

Anjali Ramachandran and S. Prashant Kumar, B.S. Madhava Rao Papers, MS-013, Finding Aid. (February 2024) Archives at NCBS, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru. https://catalogue.archives.ncbs.res.in/repositories/2/resources/29

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