Rehman, Junaid

Junaid Rehman is a PhD candidate specializing in the history of science, capitalism, and the environment in early modern South Asia and the broader Indian Ocean world. His dissertation examines precolonial vernacular data technologies used by mercantile and religious guilds in the Western Ghats of Karnataka to govern land, resources, and people. Drawing on rare kadata scrolls in Modi-Kannada, it traces how these technologies of recordkeeping came into uneven tension with emergent modern data regimes that reshaped agrarian and plantation governance in the region.

He holds a BA (Honours) in English from Christ University, Bengaluru, and an MA in Literary Arts from Ambedkar University Delhi. He also holds an MA and an M.Phil in History from Columbia University. His broader research interests include the history of knowledge and recordkeeping, environmental history, questions of archival method, commodity production, and political economy in the Indian Ocean world.