I am a PhD Candidate (SRF) in the HSS Department of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal, India. I am pursuing my doctoral research on social and cultural history of space program in India during the 1960s-1990s. In my research, I am especially interested in exploring the complex histories of India’s space program by looking at the lived experiences of the scientists and engineers, disciplinization and institutionalisation of space research and varied forms of its organisational culture.

Given the restrained nature of post-colonial science archives in India, I use both ethnography and the archives to delve deeper into the life of space program in Indian context, and in that process, sometime I also utilise the ethnography of archival life. Such methodological approaches, will not only help unfurling messiness of space history in a more nuanced manner, it will also enable us to rethink space history in a post-colonial country by going beyond, what Asif Siddiqi has termed as, ‘tropes of master narrative’ and conceptualizing it in terms of geographies of knowledge.