2025 Lecture: A Possible History of the Green Revolution
Professor Prakash Kumar delivering a talk at the second annual Moti Lal and Kamla Rustgi Lecture on India.
The second annual Moti Lal and Kamla Rustgi Lecture on India was given by Prakash Kumar, associate professor of South Asian history at Pennsylvania State University, on November 6, 2025 at 3:30pm in O'Brian Hall, UB North Campus.
Prakash Kumar is author of Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India (Cambridge 2012) and A History of India’s Green Revolution: Reign of Technocracy (Cambridge 2025), Kumar has published widely in the fields of history of science and technology in colonial and postcolonial India, agriculture, development, and Indo-US relations. His new work is on the history of epidemics in colonial India.
Drawing from his recent book on India's green revolution, Professor Kumar delivered a historically rich and insightful talk titled "A Possible History of the Green Revolution". In this lecture, Kumar traced the roots of India’s agricultural transformation to Cold War geopolitics, colonial legacies, and a technocratic belief in technology as the solution to underdevelopment. He argued that the Green Revolution was not a nationwide ecological movement but a regionally confined, state-supported model of extractive agriculture centered in northwestern India. Through archival research and historical analysis, Kumar illuminated the dilemmas of food security, modernization, and agrarian policy that continue to shape India today.
This lecture was sponsored by the Moti Lal and Kamla Rustgi Lecture on India Fund and cosponsored by the UB Asia Research Institute and Department of History.
