Biography
Dr Shrikant Botre is an Affiliate Research Fellow at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (GHSM). He has worked on the Wellcome Trust funded postdoctoral project “The Invention of Vegetarian India: Marathi Dietary Politics, 1900-1960” and in that capacity was appointed as a Research Fellow at GHSM-King’s and the University of Warwick.
Shrikant completed his PhD from the University of Warwick on the caste analysis of sexual science in late colonial western India. He received the degree in 2018. For completing the doctorate, Shrikant was awarded with the Chancellor’s International Scholarship.
Between 2017 and 2018 he worked as an Early Career Fellow at Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study. In the first phase of his research on sexology, between 2013 and 2014, Shrikant was hosted as a research scholar by the Advanced Centre for Women Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and the Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dartmouth College, Hanover.
Research
- Caste Studies
- Sexuality
- Food Politics
- Histories of health and fitness
- Print Networks in Modern India
- Popular Science
- South Asia
Shrikant works on the histories of social hierarchy, health, and power- specifically, on how cultural constructions of science and the rhetoric of scientificity shaped late-colonial and post-colonial Indian understandings of modernity.
Based on examining Indian print networks and archival narratives, he analyses the politics of dietetics, sexual science, and the body, in reference to the structural re-making of caste. Shrikant’s forthcoming book "The Body Language of Caste; Sexual Modernity in Western India, 1920-1950" (Temple University Press) maps multiple sexological discourses that illuminates the nexus between reproduction and the reproduction of caste.
His ongoing postdoctoral research analyses the historical relationship between the everyday understanding of food and health and the social power. By interpreting a range of Marathi nutrition literature, this project explains how “science-ing” of food functioned as an epistemic tool for restructuring Brahminism in modern India.