#  Aviroop Sengupta 

Postdoctoral Fellow

 

 

 



   ![Aviroop Sengupta](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/mahindra/files/sengupta.png?itok=mpMzBGzE) 

 



 





 

 Aviroop Sengupta is a historian of science, researching the conceptual-material careers of evolutionary theory, ecology and other allied animal and human sciences in colonial and early post-colonial South Asia. He is reworking his doctoral dissertation into a monograph on the proselytization, practice and eventual demise of a cluster of ‘Indian’ – occasionally ‘indigenous’ – biological sciences between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, which premised their claims to heterodoxy on the allegedly distinct nature of environments and organisms in the subcontinent and/or alternative interpretations of their evolutionary and ecological relationships. The search for an ‘Indian’ biology, Aviroop shows, often cut across racial and political lines and was pursued by Indian as well as European scientists working in the subcontinent, animated by institutional and epistemological rivalries with metropolitan centers of science, and the practical exigencies of investigating understudied natural habitats and animals in the colonial periphery with little support from the state.

 Aviroop finished his graduate training in South Asian Studies and History at Columbia University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, respectively. His other research interests include the environmental history of the Sundarbans delta, Bengali traditions of natural history writing, and debates on the meaning of life between scientists and non-scientists in colonial India.



 

 

 





 

 

- ## Fellowship
    
     [Postdoctoral](/fellowship/postdoctoral)
- ## Fellowship Year
    
     [2024 - 2025](/fellowship-year/2024-2025)
- ## Role
    
     [Fellows](/role/fellow)