Prof. Prashant Kidambi

Prashant Kidambi is Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester. His research explores how modern South Asia was shaped by empire and nation. After completing postgraduate degrees in history from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue a doctorate at the University of Oxford. His research explores the interface between British imperialism and the history of modern South Asia. He is the author of The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890-1920 and the lead editor of Bombay before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos.

He has written extensively on Indian cities, public culture, politics, and sport, including the award-winning Cricket Country  (2019) which forms a detailed account of the 1911 All-India cricket team tour of England. The book places the tour in the context of its times and environment, when the British empire was at its peak, London was the centre of the world, and the Edwardian era of excess and opulence played itself out during the coronation of George V. It is also the extraordinary tale of how the idea of India took shape on the cricket pitch long before the country gained its political independence. Cricket Country was the first work on sport to be shortlisted for the prestigious Wolfson History Prize.

Professor Kidambi is currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow, working on a new biography of the controversial Indian nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920). His Inaugural Lecture, which takes place on Wednesday 4 June 2025, ‘Thinking with the City’ will draw on materials from colonial and postcolonial South Asia and focus on the city to explore three inter-related themes: how crisis reconfigures urban landscapes; how civic spaces simultaneously foster cohesion and conflict; and how the interplay between power and resistance makes and unmakes urban forms.