Tilak Tewari

Tilak is exploring transnational environmental history.

PhD Graduate in History
School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations

Qualifications

PhD in History, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2024

MA Comparative History with Distinction, Central European University, 2020

MA Medieval History with Distinction, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2018

BA (Hons) with First Class Honours, History, University of Delhi, 2016

Profile

PhD Title: Vertical knowledge: hill stations as localities of science, health and aesthetics in British India, c. 1760–1920

Tilak completed his PhD in 2025.

Tilak is studying high-altitude colonial enclaves, known as ‘hill stations,’ established in South and Southeast Asia by British colonists throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His MA thesis was designed as a social history of hill stations and studied the complexity of British social life therewith. In addition to commentaries on leisure, boredom, scandal, and imperial self-fashioning, Tilak investigated the internal dynamics and contradictions present within the minority ruling elite, their relationships with indigenous peoples, and the interplay between high-altitude hilly environments and imperial identity formation.

Tilak’s current research is broadly from the lens of environmental history with a focus on transnational eco-cultural networks and the environmental impact of settling the hill stations and their surroundings. Hill stations were also arenas of scientific exploration and attracted colonial specialists interested in ideas of climate, health, sanitation as well as geology, cartography, and life sciences. To this end, Tilak also critically evaluates the evolution and diffusion of scientific ideas in the colonial context.

Environmental history being interdisciplinary and able to draw on diverse historiographical trends, Tilak’s research is also situated in discourses on history croisée, microhistory, and biography.