Mr. Suraj Kushwaha is a recent graduate of Princeton University, where he studied a self-designed curriculum for an independent major in Postcolonial Environmental Studies. His research interests center around South Asian languages, culture, and history. He has lived and studied in India for two years, first on Princeton’s Bridge Year Program in Varanasi and later on a Boren Scholarship for intensive Hindi language study in Jaipur and Mussoorie. He is especially interested in the Himalaya, its people, and the complex environmental, economic, and cultural conflicts that have arisen with the opening of this region to unprecedented numbers of pilgrims, tourists, and mountaineers through globalization and development. His research interests include the imperial legacy of Himalayan mountaineering and the role of mountaineering in the formation of an “Indian” identity. His senior thesis probed the role of local knowledge in the colonial exploration of the Himalaya and Tibet. He hopes to address the absence of local people’s and porters’ perspectives in the history of mountaineering by collaborating on oral history and ethnographic research alongside these communities.
After the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Mr. Kushwaha hopes to pursue graduate studies and a career as a professor. Outside of his studies, Mr. Kushwaha gravitates toward the remote, vertical environments of mountains near and far. As an avid climber and aspiring mountain guide, he views climbing as a transformative medium to connect with environment, self, and others. He is constantly pushing his own limits in climbing and helping others to break down barriers and do the same.
Mr. Kushwaha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring and documenting the histories and lived experiences of porters working in India’s Central Himalayan Mountain tourism industry. By observing porters on their assignments and conducting interviews with consenting porters, he hopes to identify key issues facing porters in an evolving labor geography. The research seeks to address the omission of porters’ perspectives from the discourse on the legacy of imperialism in the Himalaya. Mr. Kushwaha hopes to highlight porters’ crucial role in a growing industry and understand the challenges they face as they navigate a nuanced labor niche inflected by a history of British imperial exploration.