Nikhil Joseph Dharan

My interests lie at the intersection of the history of the chemical sciences, colonialism, and the environment in modern South India, though my curiosity stretches much wider. The First World War first captured my historical imagination, especially how this pivotal event impacted global empires, social orders, scientific practice, and cultural ideology for the rest of the twentieth century. 

My dissertation project, Colonial Alchemies, traces the connections between chemical knowledge, industrialization, and late colonialism in South India. Focusing on Tamil-speaking regions of the Madras Presidency during the interwar period, I seek to understand how the establishment of homegrown chemical industries was driven by various political, economic, scientific, and social interests. In my research, I explore such topics as: the founding of the Indian Institute of Science as a site for chemical training; Indian entrepreneurs and their dealings with the colonial adminstration; the extraction of forest products for the production of leather, matches, and sandalwood soap; and the industrial aspriations of South India's first local political movement, the Justice Party. The questions that animate me include: how did chemistry become a means for producing and extracting value? What was it like to run a chemical business in the early twentieth century colonial world? What was the broader material landscape upon which industrial ventures relied? And, how do we make sense of the dramatic industrial transformations in South India, given that most colonial interventions in this area were half-measures at best?

I also have interests in the history of Indian medicine, and particularly the influence of colonial rule on traditions such as Siddha/Ayurveda. I am currently pursuing a separate research project on the first government school and hospital for Indian medicine in South India, established in Madras in the late 1920s. Students there studied Siddha, Ayurveda, and Unani using both textual and clinical approaches, at the same time that they studied anatomy, physiology, and other sciences associated with Western biomedicine. I am especially interested in how the staff found both practical and novel ways to reconcile the differences between distinct medical traditions.

With Claire Sabel, Taylor Dysart, and Koyna Tomar, I was a co-coordinator of Science Beyond the West in the Department of History and Sociology of Science. Through my involvement with this working group, I became passionate for developing new pedagogies to teach the global history of science, and co-organized a conference on this topic at Penn in October 2019.

Prior to beginning graduate school, I studied chemistry and history at Washington University in St. Louis. As a Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellow, I conducted research on how the First World War kickstarted British imperial responses to the nitrogen problem, or the global crisis of the scarcity of nitrogen, itself a critical component of both fertilizers and explosives. In colonial India, the war became a moment of opportunity to meld science with a vision for the future of agriculture. Investigating the links between chemistry, war, and colonialism is what led me to pursue further study as a PhD student, and resulted in my current dissertation project.

I was also involved in programming with the Center for the Humanities at WashU. This experience, as well as working for two years as a program associate at the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) left me with a deep commitment towards multidisciplinary inquiry and the value of a liberal arts education.

In my free time, I enjoy swimming, music, finding my next favorite TV show, taking road trips, and generally spending time with my cats and husband.