STS Colloquium Series - Parkash Kumar

Contextualizing the Silver Bullet

The high yielding variety seeds (or HYVs) are overwhelmingly depicted in current historiography as the silver bullet that solved the problem of hunger in many parts of the Global South in the 1960s. Developed by Rockefeller breeders, these seeds of wheat and paddy were globalized by cold warriors who wished to obtain agricultural yield increase in their fight against communism that assumedly was prone to spread among the world’s poor and hungry. Deviating from such self-assured perspectives on the efficacy of HYVs, this talk turns attention to the history of past efforts at yield enhancement that were folded into the decision to invite HYVs into India, the turbulent years in which HYVs arrived in India, and the technocratic belief that stood by these seeds and ensured that they were given a chance to succeed. The fact that the HYV revolution has remained a limited regional phenomenon despite efforts to extend it elsewhere in India beckons us to treat the HYVs as historical beings that have a particular and contingent past of their own.

Prakash Kumar is an associate professor of South Asian history at Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in the history of science, agrarian lives, epidemics, development, Indo-US relations, and Cold War era modernization. He is the author of two books, one on colonial science (Cambridge, 2012) and a recent one on the history of the Green Revolution in India (Cambridge, 2025). He is currently working on a history of public health and epidemics in India. His works have been funded twice by the National Science Foundation, by US Fulbright Commission, and the German Historical Institute.

*This is a hybrid event and can be joined via zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/91010794077?pwd=xo7XulNI7TzPOPMK0GeYAcgbb1Hplp.1

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