Head of the Department, Professor of History, Ashoka University
Ph.D. SOAS University of LondonMukharji is a historian of science focusing on the period between the 18th and the 20th centuries. Before joining Ashoka, he was a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that he also taught at universities in Canada and the UK. Mukharji’s work has been widely recognized, and he has received prestigious grants from the National Science Foundation of the USA [NSF], and the Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada [SSHRC], amongst others. Mukharji has also been the recipient of the Pfizer Award and the Guggenheim Fellowship.
Mukharji’s work brings together the two distinct scholarly traditions of Subaltern Studies and the social history of science. He is thus particularly interested in issues of marginality and marginalization both within and through science. He has explored these themes through the histories of daktari medicine, modern Ayurveda, rasayana, chemistry, sexology, population genetics, and, lately, parapsychology.
Mukharji’s work aspires to simultaneously recover the neglected histories of Indian science and the forgotten labors of the lower rungs of the scientific workforce—technicians, assistants, illustrators, sample collectors, and so forth. By looking closely at scientific practice, rather than just the big ideas, he seeks to underline the collaborative, material and historical nature of scientific knowledge production.
Mukharji is the author of three monographs, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print, and Daktari Medicine (London, 2009); Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences (Chicago: 2016) and Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920-66 (Chicago: 2022). His articles have appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies in History & Society, Journal of Asian Studies, Indian Economic & Social History Review, Studies in History, History of Science, Journal of the History of Knowledge, Osiris, BJHS Themes, Technology & Culture, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Social History of Medicine, etc.
He also writes regularly in Bangla for a broader audience. His articles have appeared in the Rabibasariya, Udbodhan, Harappa, Kolkata-21, Ababhash, Alochona Chakra, etc. Currently Mukharji serves as the Co-Editor in Chief of Isis: The Journal of the History of Science Society.