More about Mahesh

Mahesh Rangarajan is a researcher, author and historian with a special interest in environmental history and colonial history of British India. He appears frequently on Indian television as a political analyst. He is also a columnist in the print media writing on wildlife conservation, political and environmental issues. In 2010, he led the Elephant task force (Gajah) of the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests. The task force was formed to formulate measures for the protection of elephants in India.

Mahesh Rangarajan taught and lectured at Oxford and moved as the Assistant Editor of the The Telegraph (Kolkata) for a year.

Mahesh is presently a Professor of history at Delhi University. He has taught courses in environmental history and conservation at several institutions. From 2001 to 2004, he was a visiting faculty at the Department of History, hosted with the Mario Einaudi Centre for International Relations, Cornell University, where he taught South Asian Environmental History. He has been a Visitor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science several times where he researched and wrote some of his books. He has helped design courses in wildlife conservation at the National Centre for Biological Sciences and is one of the core faculties in that course and also the syllabus for environmental studies at Delhi University.

He has written several books and articles on politics and history of wildlife conservation, forest rights and environmental history. In the book, Battles over Nature, he analyses present-day conservation conflicts and finds their roots in India’s colonial past and in the governance system that was adopted as an independent nation state. He was a member of the founding team and corresponding editor of the Cambridge-based journal Environment and History headed by Richard Grove. He is a member of the executive board of the Association of South Asian Environmental Historians.