Aniket Alam


Associate Professor
Ph.D (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
Research Areas: Western Himalayas and Mountain Societies; History of State and its Institutions; Historical Methods; Geography and History
Email: aniket.alam@iiit.ac.in

I am an historian who has worked as a journalist, editor, publisher, and international non-governmental organisation employee over the past 24 years. At IIIT, Hyderabad I teach History and other courses. I helped in establishing the Human Sciences Research Centre and start the BTech/MS dual degree programme which combines the computer and human sciences in one teaching and research curriculum.

My primary research interest is on the history of the Himalayas and Asian Highlands. I am also interested in studying the historical development of the State, as well as intellectual history. At IIIT I have attempted to bring computational methods like Spatial Informatics, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to the study of history.

I have just completed a project on the historical transformation of Spiti, Himachal Pradesh. At present I am working on two research projects; one which attempts to collect, collate, create and digitise historical maps of the Asian Highlands, and the other which hopes to build an open knowledge archive of oral sources on the Himalayas.

I grew up in Shimla, the summer capital of British India, in the 1970s and 80s. After graduating with an honours in History from the University of Delhi, I studied for my masters in modern Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University. I continued at JNU for my PhD, where I researched the history of colonialism in the western Himalayas, an area where I had grown up.

In my book Becoming India: Western Himalayas Under British Rule (Cambridge University Press, Delhi, 2008) I argued for a regionally specific history of colonialism in the Western Himalayas, whose geographical, social, and political-economic contexts could not be subsumed under the broad category of India. My current research on the Himalayas builds on this idea of regionalised history to argue that highland Asia has historically been a singular and distinct social formation. The particular aspects I am researching at present includes family forms, trans-regional trade, religious institutions, agricultural transformations, political movements, and border-making.

I have also been interested in studying the State as a historical artefact, focusing in particular on family forms, technologies of governance, and popular politics. One area of particular interest has been historical methods, as I have struggled to bring together Annales, Marxist, and Structuralist methods, more recently with computational tools, to make sense of the past (and present). I have also become deeply interested in Oral History and in the historical transformations between orality and print cultures.

I have presented papers at seminars and conferences on topics from these themes in Himachal Pradesh University, the University of Copenhagen, Indian Institute of Advanced Study Shimla, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Rajasthan University, IIT Guwahati, Kings College London, NALSAR University, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Shiv Nadar University, Ambedkar University Delhi, West Bengal State University, Aligarh Muslim University, Asiatic Society Calcutta, among others. I have also conducted numerous workshops on academic writing in the social sciences at universities and research institutions all over India.

I was the executive editor of the Economic and Political Weekly until July 2016 and have worked as a journalist with The Hindu newspaper (2001-2005). I have also worked as national programme officer of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (2005-2006), and as coordinator of Panos International’s network of eight global organisations (2006-2008).

Select Publications

  • [Article] “Markets in the Making of Borders in Colonial Western Himalayas”, in Farhana Ibrahim and Tanuja Kothiyal (eds), South Asian Borderlands: Mobility, History, Affect, Cambridge University Press, 2022.
  • [Article] coauthored with Aquib Jamal: “Evolution of Political Ideology in India: A Study through Election Manifestoes”, Proceedings of the 79th Conference of the Mid-West Political Science Association, 2022.
  • [Article] coauthored with Neha Ummareddy: “What Do Preambles Do? A Study of Constitutional Intent and Reality”, Studies in Indian Politics, Vol 9, No 2, p.221-238, 2021.
  • [Article] coauthored with Srujay Reddy, Chherring Palkit: “Mapping the Chortens of Spiti Valley, Himachal Pradesh, Proceedings of the Annual Kathmandu Conference on Nepal and the Himalaya, 2020.
  • [Article] coauthored with Amitha Gopidi, “Computational analysis of the historical changes in poetry and prose”, Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, p 14-22, 2019.
  • [Article] coauthored with Dhruv Sapra, “Empowering Citizenship through Social Network Analysis: A Case Study from Indian Politics”, 5th International Conference on Computational Social Science, University of Amsterdam, 2019.
  • [Article] coauthored with Shubham Rathi, “Generating Counterfacutal and Constrastive Explanations using SHAP”, Proceeding of the 2nd International Conference on Innovation in Artificial Intelligence, Suzou, China, 2019.
  • [Article] coauthored with Shubham Rathi: “ESO-5W1H Framework: Ontological model for SITL paradigm”, Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Augmenting Intelligence with Humans-in-the-Loop co-located with the 17th International Semantic Web Conference, Monterey, California. HumL@ISWC, 2169, p.51-63, 2018
  • [Article] coauthored with Lasya Venneti, “How curiosity can be modeled for a clickbait detector”, arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.04212, 2018
  • [Article] coauthored with Lasya Venneti, “Clickbaits: Curios Hypertexts for news narratives in the digital medium”, NHT, Extended Proceedings of ACM Hypertext, 2017.
  • [Article] “Clueless Nationalists: The Indian Left in the Era of Globalisation”, in Research Journal Social Sciences, Panjab University, 2017, Vol 25, Nos, 1 & 2, pp 1-22.
  • [Article] “Class in the Formation of Himachal Pradesh”, published in Akeel Bilgirami (ed) Marx, Gandhi and Modernity, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2014.
  • [Book] Becoming India: Western Himalayas during British Rule, Cambridge University Press, Delhi, 2008.

Masters Thesis Supervision

At present I have seven students registered for their MS thesis working under my supervision. They are Ch Swamy Naidu, Keshav Bajaj, Hitesh Goel, Devesh Marwah, Ayush Maurya, Aishani Pandey, and Kriti Agrawal.

The following students have submitted their thesis:

  • Lasya Venneti, Computational Study of the Politics of Outrage: An Analysis of Curiosity and Outrage in Online Platforms, 2018.
  • Shubham Rathi, Legal Issues and Computational Measures at the Cross-Section of AI, Law, and Policy, 2018.
  • Dhruv Sapra, Reversing the Gaze: Empowering Citizenship Through Digital Humanities, 2019.
  • Amitha Gopidi, Poetry in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: A Computational Study, 2019.
  • Srujay Reddy, GIS based Interactive Maps for Exploring the Religious Geography of Spiti Valley, Himachal Pradesh, 2020
  • Neha Ummareddy, Identities in Preambles and their Impact on Nation-States, 2021.
  • Sravya Gurram, Art or Not?: An Analysis of Sport Using Automata Theory, 2022.
  • Aquib Jamal, Evolution of Political Ideology in India in the First Two Decades of the 21st Century, 2022.

Ph.D Thesis Supervision

At present I have two doctoral candidates working under my supervision. Aman Kant Panta is working on the political history of Himachal Pradesh in the 20th century, and Regina Gurung is working on the social transformations in Sikkim after its ascension to the Union of India.