“How one might want to engage with the gene editor CRISPR-Cas is a vital query. And it is more important than ever to ask these questions, because of how strongly our worlds are being shaped by engineering research and scientific research, and because of how fast these areas are evolving.”

Phalkey’s work so far has focused on the history and evolution of three specific niches: aerodynamics, statistics, and nuclear programmes.

She was recently awarded the Infosys Prize in Humanities for her work in the last of those. In research papers, and in her 2013 book Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India, she examines India’s nuclear programmes in a postcolonial context. Her work “braids the global history of science, particularly nuclear science, with the anthropology of the postcolonial State”, states the Infosys citation.

Her book, for instance, examines the role of the State in supporting and organising early research, in a field where it was impossible to separate politics from the lab. It interrogates ties between individual scientists and political leaders, between scientific administrators and state bureaucrats. It explores how their decisions shaped the structures of elite scientific research and policy in the country today.

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Long before she found her niche, Phalkey says, she felt driven to answer questions about why our built world looks the way it does.

Growing up in Amravati and then in Mumbai, the child of college lecturers, this drove her to graduate in political science; secure a Master’s degree in Asian and African politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Then, in 1998, she began work on a PhD on the political economy of silent cinema in India, at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay.

With film, “I was exploring what one might call the political economy of a new technology… and questions of representation and identity on screen,” she says. But Phalkey was now seeking a greater purpose in her work. “I knew I had to do something different, and I didn’t necessarily know what that new path would be.”

In 2000, a research programme in the history of science opened up at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “I decided to take a chance. If it didn’t work out, I would take up a scholarship I had on offer at Sciences Po in Paris,” she says.

It did work out; Phalkey found herself exploring some of our biggest questions — including, in different ways, the idea of: what could we have done differently? It was while trying to decide on a subject for her PhD at Georgia Tech that she started to research the beginnings of experimental nuclear physics in India.

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Her next book, Phalkey says, will be rooted in her work on the history of statistical sampling in India, Meanwhile, she’s been interacting with her target reader in a rather unexpected way.

Since 2018, Phalkey has been founding director of the Science Gallery in Bengaluru, a non-profit establishment set up as part of the Science Gallery Network, which partners with universities and governments around the world to drive public engagement with science.

“Right now, we have a banana-tasting festival on at the gallery, to open up conversations on how biodiversity is decreasing, how we have made industrial and agricultural choices, what the consequences of these have been on flora and fauna, on nutrition, and on climate change,” Phalkey says. The gallery also conducts experiments, holds film screenings, and is developing a clutch of open-source games.

This space pushes her to engage with what’s happening in the present, Phalkey says, and it allows her the pleasure of hinting at a question, stepping back, and, “like any good historian”, watching as dots connect in another person’s mind.

In her spare time, she is researching how India, a pioneer in statistical sampling in the mid-20th century, faded from prominence in this field.

“At independence, India, like China, confronted the problem of reliable data for policy-making,” she says. “China went the census way, as Arunabh Ghosh shows brilliantly in Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (2020). India took the road of sampling, by building on methods developed by giants such as Prasanta Mahalanobis and CR Rao.”

Mahalanobis’s methods became the backbone of the newly formed National Sample Survey Organisation. “Angus Deaton, Nobel Laureate in economics in 2015, once said: ‘Where Mahalanobis and India led, the rest of the world has followed, so that today, most countries have a recent household income or expenditure survey. Most countries can only envy India in its statistical capacity.’ Statisticians in India will tell you that key institutions in this field don’t seem to now function in the same way as before. The statistical architecture of India has depleted over the last few decades,” Phalkey says. My goal is to trace the imperatives, the thinking and the methods that shaped this enviable capacity, and what became of it all, in the world of numbers in the years that followed.”

In this as-yet-untitled book, Phalkey aims to take the reader backstage as well, to show how key macro data is generated. She wants people to really understand, she says, why numbers cannot be viewed outside the landscapes and contexts that birthed them. Her book, she hopes, will act as something of a field guide to these worlds. “So that the next time someone throws numbers about,” she says, “the reader will know enough to point out that digits are never arguments in themselves.”