Pratyay Nath
Pratyay Nath
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Pratyay Nath is an Assistant Professor and the Head, Department of History, Ashoka University. Trained as a historian of medieval and early modern South Asia, he specialises in the history of war and empire. He earned his PhD in History from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in 2016. The areas of his research interest include Mughal history, imperial history, military history, global history, early modern history, and the history of medieval and early modern South Asia.
Professor Nath's first book Climate of Conquest: War, Environment, and Empire in Mughal North India was published from Oxford University Press in 2019. Several of his research articles have been published in edited volumes, conference proceedings, and journals. He is currently writing a global history of Mughal warfare in the sixteenth century.
Prior to joining Ashoka, Nath taught medieval and early modern history at Miranda House, New Delhi, at St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi, and at Presidency College (now Presidency University), Calcutta. He was awarded the DAAD-funded ‘A New Passage to India III’ fellowship for 2013-14, whereby he worked for a year as a research fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Georg-August Universität, Göttingen, Germany.
Professor Nath completed his Bachelor’s in History from Presidency College, Calcutta in 2006 and his Master’s in History from University of Calcutta in 2008 with a specialisation in the history of early medieval South Asia. He earned his MPhil in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2011.
A selected list of publications include:
‘Through the Lens of War: Akbar’s Sieges (1567-69) and Mughal Empire-Building in Early Modern North India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 41, no. 2, 2018, pp. 245-258.
‘Building the Empire: Military Infrastructure and the Career of Muhammad Qasim Khan in Mughal North India’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Seventy-Fifth Session, Delhi, 2014, pp. 270-274.
‘Warfare in Early Modern South Asia, c. 1520 – c. 1740’ in Pius Malekandathil (ed.), The Indian Ocean in the Making of Early Modern India, New Delhi: Manohar, 2016, pp. 175-212.
‘Battles, Boats and Bridges: Modalities of Mughal Amphibious Warfare, 1571-1612’ in Peter Lorge and Kaushik Roy (eds.) Chinese and Indian Warfare – From Classical Age to 1870, London and New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 146-165.
‘Rethinking Early Mughal Warfare: Babur’s Pitched Battles, 1499-1529’, in Raziuddin Aquil and Kaushik Roy (eds.), Warfare, Religion, and Society in Indian History, New Delhi: Manohar, 2012, pp. 109-145.
‘Siege Warfare in Mughal India, 1519-1538’ in Kaushik Roy (ed.), Warfare and Politics in South Asia from Ancient to Modern Times, New Delhi: Manohar, 2011, pp. 121-144.
Terracotta Tales: Entangled Histories of Bhakti, Violence and Empire from Early Modern Bengal.
‘Narratives of Akbar’s Sieges and the Construction of Mughal Universal Sovereignty’, in Jamel Ostwald and Anke Fischer-Katner (eds.), Re-Presenting Early Modern Siege Warfare, Leiden: Brill, forthcoming.
'Looking beyond the Military Revolution: Variations in Early Modern Warfare and the Mughal Case'. (Under Review)
'A Social History of War: Non-Elite Military Labour in the Making of the Mughal Empire'. (Under Review)
'Mughal Empire and the Natural Environment'. (Under Review)
A list of his forthcoming articles include:
'What is Military Labour? War, Logistics, and the Mughals in Early Modern South Asia', War in History.
‘‘The Wrath of God’: Legitimisation and Limits of Military Violence in Early Modern South Asia,’ in A Global History of Violence in the Early Modern World eds. Peter Wilson, Erica Charters, and Marie Houllemare (Manchester University Press).
'Physical Geography and Mughal Expansion' in Dennis Showalter and Kaushik Roy (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Warfare in Asia (Oxford University Press).
''লেভায়াথান না কাগুজে বাঘ?' মুঘল রাষ্ট্রের চরিত্র' [''Leviathan or Paper Tiger?' The Nature of the Mughal State'], নাথ ও সেনগুপ্ত (সম্পাদিত), ইতিহাসের বিতর্ক, বিতর্কের ইতিহাস [Debates of History, History of Debates] (Ananda Publishers Pvt. Ltd.)
'Was Mughal Warfare 'Early Modern'?' in Nath and Bhargava (eds), The Early Modern in South Asian History (Cambridge University Press)
A list of his book reviews include -
Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman and Mughal Empires: Social History in the Early Modern World, London and New York: IB Tauris, 2019, Medieval History Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 2020, pp. 170-174.
Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi, Fathpur Sikri Revisited, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013, South Asian History and Culture, vol. 5, no. 3, 2014, pp. 389-393.
Image Source: Pratiti, Undergraduate Batch of 2020
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