Nikhil Menon

Nikhil Menon is a historian of modern South Asia. His research focuses on twentieth-century India, particularly histories of democracy, development, and diplomacy in independent India.

Menon’s first book, Planning Democracy: Modern India's Quest for Development (Cambridge University Press, 2022) reveals how India wedded western-style liberal democracy and Soviet inspired economic planning in the mid-twentieth century, when the Cold War pitted them as incompatible. Planning enabled the establishment of independent India’s data infrastructure, through pioneering surveys, statistics, and computers. Simultaneously, the rhetoric of ‘democratic planning’ led to the government engaging citizens through means as varied as films, plays, and even Hindu ascetics. The book was awarded the Joseph W. Elder Prize by the American Institute of Indian Studies, and it was a finalist for the British Association for South Asian Studies' Book Prize. An article from this project, on India’s first computers, won the Mahoney Prize from the Society for the History of Technology.

He is working on a new book titled ‘Status Anxiety: The Global Life of Indian Culture’. It explores how the Indian republic shaped global perceptions of the nation by exporting and exhibiting Indian culture across the world—a contentious process that entailed redefining Indian culture at home and abroad. A peer reviewed article from this project is forthcoming in the Journal of Global History.

Menon co-edited The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury, 2018). His academic writing has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Global History, Journal of the History of Ideas, Modern Asian Studies, Indian Economic and Social History Review, and History Compass. He has also written for public audiences in the BBC, The Indian Express, The Hindu, and The Times of India among others outlets.

Before completing his PhD from Princeton University, where he was selected for the Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences (formerly the Society of Woodrow Wilson Scholars), Menon received an M.Phil. in Modern Indian History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and an M.A. and B.A. in History from the University of Delhi.