Swarnabh is a PhD candidate working at the intersection of critical geography, environmental history, and urban studies. His dissertation focuses on the intertwined geographies of perennial irrigation, primary commodity production, and crisis formation in northwestern India from the late-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries. It reinterprets the crisis tendencies of agricultural production in the later twentieth century—including those associated with the so-called “Green Revolution”—by situating them within a multiscalar historical geography of colonial territorialization, socioecological expropriation, and commodity frontier expansion. It shows how diverse imperial strategies for securing the spatiotemporal conditions of capitalist commodity production transformed biophysical relations, produced crisis-riven agrarian environments, and engendered durable patterns of uneven development that shaped the contradictory trajectories of postcolonial agrarian development in northern India.

Swarnabh holds a Master of Philosophy in Urban Studies from the University of Cambridge and a Master of Architecture from Yale University. His research interests include geographical political economy, critical urban theory, political ecology, and the environmental history of capitalism. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Urban Studies, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, and The Avery Review.

Project: Wheat City: Karachi in the Commodity Revolution, 1880s-1920s