In 2014, the Government of India quintupled the scope of its National Solar Mission. With its revised target of 100 MW of solar capacity by 2022, this ambitious program did much more than catapult solar energy to the forefront of India’s development priorities. My dissertation, Shadows of Sunlight: Epistemic Experiments with Solar Energy in India, shows how solar transforms established categories of knowledge––“energy”, “rationality”, “the future”, “the environment”––with implications far beyond this particular initiative. Chronicling the work of politicians, policymakers and activists, and drawing extensively from gray literature, the project engages debates in anthropology, science and technology studies, the sociology of knowledge, and political theory to chart the “worlding” of solar into a modern energy form.

This website was created in an effort to disseminate images of energy infrastructure taken during fieldwork conducted across various rural and urban sites in India from 2015-2017. They are mostly devoid of human beings in compliance with IRB norms that require me to protect the identities of my informants. 

If you are accessing this webpage from a mobile device, use this link to view the entire gallery. All images are under creative commons copyright, and are free to use, modify and share for non-commercial purposes with attribution. 

I earned my PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine in June 2021. More recently, I completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2022-23, I will be a Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. My previous degrees include an MA and an MPhil in Political Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Please write to me at nbadami@uci.edu if you would like to get in touch.