CJ Kuncheria

CJ Kuncheria is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His research charts out a history of tobacco in colonial India. He focuses on the ways in which the plant was transformed culturally, materially and biologically through the agencies of states, tobacco firms, markets, consumers, scientific institutions and peasants. He has been awarded a Junior Research Fellowship from the Indian Council of Historical Research for his work. Prior to taking an MA in modern history from JNU, Kuncheria was a politics and economics correspondent for Reuters in New Delhi. At Yale, he will expand on the transnational aspects of his research. He will look at the ways in which how American tobacco cultivation and trade shaped the making of Indian tobacco, and on how the emergence of Indian and Empire tobacco altered the patterns of American production of the leaf.