Biographical note

Sahara Ahmed is Professor at the Department of History, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, India. She obtained her Ph.D. from University of Calcutta. Her research interests include histories of ecology, environment, and sustainable development, health and medicine in colonial and post-colonial contexts. She is the author of Woods, Mines and Minds: Politics of Survival in Jalpaiguri and the Jungle Mahals, 1860–1970 (Primus, 2019). Her most recent publications—‘Epidemics and the Indigenous Tribes: Sub-Himalayan Bengal and the Jungle Mahals’, in Poonam Bala and Russel Viljoen (eds.), Epidemic Encounters, Communities in the Colonial World (Lexington Books, 2023), and ‘Designing scientific mining: evolution and implementation, c. 1860s–1960s’, in Suvobrata Sarkar (ed.), History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine in India (Routledge, 2022). She is the secretary of the Society for the History of Science Kolkata 

Suvobrata Sarkar teaches history at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. He obtained his Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His research explores the history of technology in the context of the 19th and 20th century South Asia. Sarkar is the author of Let there be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), in addition to several articles and book chapters. He has also edited the History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine in India (Routledge, 2022). He received the Maurice Daumas Prize 2019 from the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC).