5 Questions with Aniket Aga PhD ’16

Aniket Aga PhD ’16 is Assistant Professor of Geography at SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of Genetically Modified Democracy (Yale, 2021), which won the 2022 Ludwick Fleck Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science. With Chitrangada Choudhury, he is the co-director of the documentary film Seed Stories (2024), which has been screened at multiple international film festivals including the Kolkata People’s Film Festival and the Festival delle Terre in Rome. His doctoral thesis was awarded the Sardar Patel Award by the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016, and he won the 2019–20 Bharadwaj-Wolf Prize from the Journal of Peasant Studies for his research on agriculture, political economy, and science and technology studies.

Daevan Mangalmurti: How did you become an anthropologist?

Aniket Aga: My first degree is in electronics engineering from IIT Kharagpur. After I graduated, I worked for two years as a management consultant at McKinsey. I wasn’t charmed by the idea of an MBA, and I had always been interested in the social sciences, but I didn’t know how to get into them. Someone I knew suggested that I try for a PhD in business, and so I applied to US business schools, and came to the University of Southern California. While there I slowly figured out that a sociology or anthropology program would actually be the best fit for me. I reapplied to doctoral programs and was extremely fortunate and privileged to be accepted at Yale. Yale was a great experience. It’s such a vibrant place for South Asian Studies research, with a very strong training in historical anthropology and agrarian studies. Plus there are exciting and interesting visitors from whom one can learn so much.

DM: How did you find your research focus and how has your research evolved?

AA: Before getting into Yale in 2010, I had spent the summer in India in 2009, and at the time, the issue of genetically modified eggplant—“Bt brinjal”—was exploding. I thought to myself, “Here’s a topic that brings together agriculture, science and technology, and politics.” In my first term I approached Shivi [K. Sivaramakrishnan] about this, and he was very receptive to the idea of researching this topic for my dissertation. For my research, I worked for some time in Delhi, doing archival research as well as ethnographic work within government departments. I also did fieldwork with a non-governmental organization in Delhi, in the agricultural laboratories of private companies in Maharashtra, and at a public university in Karnataka. My rural work was in western Maharashtra.

When I went to conduct fieldwork for the first time, I thought I would work in the broad science studies tradition of Bruno Latour. I came back from the field with the realization that questions of political economy remain extremely significant and that the science studies literature is unsatisfactory in terms of its ability to explain exploitation, differentials in power, and the like. For instance, in my book I show how agricultural biotechnology started overshadowing older fields of agricultural sciences. Some of that work requires understanding the kinds of changes happening during the Green Revolution. It requires understanding both global political economic shifts and shifts in the public scientific establishment in India. Latour insists that you trace the threads emerging from a laboratory to understand political and epistemic change. But after my fieldwork, I just did not find that investigative method compelling.

My last five years, which I’ve spent in India, have been extremely generative and fruitful. I’ve come across a range of inspiring movements and figures, some within the academy, but most outside. I’m now looking at how people claim knowledge through the Right to Information Act. How can we understand the right more broadly in terms of its potential to activate struggles over justice and democratization? I hope that this project goes some distance in diagnosing India’s political present. Currently, certain aspects of the political present, such as the cultural politics of the main national parties, are fleshed out. For other aspects, this is less so. I’m interested in understanding the career of an important piece of legislation over the course of 20 years. I hope to use it as a window into certain long-term structural tendencies in Indian political economy. Finally, having just collaborated with Chitrangada Choudhury on Seed Stories, a film about indigenous rice farming in Odisha, I’m quite excited about using film as a medium for research and public scholarship.

DM: Why did you make Seed Stories?

AA: When Chitrangada, the director, conceived of the film, I was drawn to the idea because the kind of agriculture I saw in Odisha was so different from what I had observed in western Maharashtra. In the latter region, a lot of heirloom seeds have been lost and farmers are dependent on external sources for knowledge on farming practices and inputs. Chitrangada and I had written about some of the agricultural dynamics we were seeing in Odisha in the People’s Archive of Rural India, edited by the noted journalist P. Sainath, which simultaneously publishes stories in multiple regional languages. But the written word doesn’t travel far in largely non-literate communities, for instance, the Indigenous farmers in Odisha we were working with. We thought that a film might be a good way to communicate to multiple audiences and bring our research to rural audiences. And, of course, we wanted to take our work back to the people who had so generously shared their time and insights with us.

DM: Much of your work is concerned with questions of justice. What about those questions motivates you?

AA: Two things: one, I take inspiration from a lot of journalists and activists. Many people dismiss journalists in India as godi [lapdog] media, failing to see that the people on the ground are in fact doing difficult work and are no more in control of editorial choices than you or I. And second, when I can see that journalists and activists are speaking truth to power, how can I be an academic and not be preoccupied with at least speaking truth, if not speaking truth to power? Fact-finding, reporting, giving prominence to marginalized standpoints, organizing—these are all central planks of any struggle for justice. These tie together academia, journalism, and activism.

DM: What reflections would you want to share with younger scholars?

AA: First, it is important to follow one’s curiosity and become aware of what animates one’s interest in a particular topic. Second, if a career in scholarship is feasible—that is a position of serious responsibility. In that case, there are things that one can do as an individual, such as work towards fulfilling one’s responsibility to the people who enable one’s research. But it’s also important to keep pushing the spaces and structures one inhabits to allow in people who have been and still largely are outside of academic circles.

DM: Thank you!