Siddharth Pandey

Siddharth Pandey (born 8 July 1987) is a writer, literary scholar, cultural historian, curator, and photographer from Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India.

His writings on Indian hill stations, popular culture, and materiality studies have appeared in academic publications as well as various Indian national-level English newspapers and online news forums.

His landscape and architecture photographs have featured in solo and thematic exhibitions in India and the United Kingdom, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum at London.

His first book of poetry, Fossil (2021), was a finalist for the Banff Mountain Book Awards in 2022.

Pandey obtained a BA (Hons), Masters (MA) and MPhil in English Literature from the Delhi University.

Jeffrey A. Auerbach writes of Pandey's essay 'Simla or Shimla: The Indian Political Re-appropriation of Little England' (2014) as a 'postcolonial counter-narrative' to the colonial, predominantly British origins of Shimla as the summer capital of the British Raj.

An essay by Pandey on Indian hill stations appears in Between Heaven and Earth: Writings on the Indian Hills (2022), an anthology of eminent historical and contemporary non-fiction writing on Indian hills, selected and edited by Ruskin Bond and Bulbul Sharma.

In her book review of this anthology in The Tribune, Sarika Sharma comments: "Siddharth Pandey’s essay is a refreshing take on the femininity of hill stations in a country brimming with toxic masculinity."

Commenting on Pandey's work in fantasy literature, Simone Kotva of the University of Cambridge writes: "Siddharth’s work looks at the representation of magic in fantasy and speculative fiction. His work upends the clichéd understanding of magic as escapist, free-form and otherworldly and demonstrates instead its close relationship to artistic making, landscape and attentiveness to material becoming."

The Indian naturalist and educator Yuvan Aves extends Pandey's arguments about the non-centralised, dispersed nature of magic in imagined magical worlds (in modern western fantasy literature) to his own understanding of the natural world, wherein he regards 'the ocean and the living earth' as intrinsically a magical place, where 'everything lives, everything speaks'.

Several of Pandey's writings in mass media have been about the aesthetics of nature, cinema, everyday culture, and craft.

Felix Ehlers of the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, writes that Pandey's work enables one to see beauty and aesthetics as an alternative, creative approach to mediation in the Anthropocene, rather than the stereotypically dystopian views around this age.

As a Fellow of the Käte Hamburger Research Centre on Global Dis:connect in Munich (2022-23), Pandey organised a two-day workshop on the theme 'Ecology, aesthetics and everyday cultures of modernity' in July 2023.

Pandey's book Fossil (2021), his geo-mythological-poetic exploration of the Himalayas, was a finalist in the 'Mountain Fiction and Poetry' category at the Banff Mountain Book Festival of Canada in 2022.

Banff mountain book awards are considered major recognitions for mountain literature in all forms from across the world.

Fossil also features in the essay 'Otters for Books for Children and Families' by the British artist Jackie Morris on her website.

Pandey is primarily known as a photographer of built and natural landscapes.

He has had a longstanding interest in the colonial-era built heritage of Shimla and its interaction with the surrounding natural landscape, as well as in old kinds of Indian and European architectures.

After that, he obtained an MPhil in Children’s Literature and a PhD in English and Materiality Studies from the University of Cambridge (2019).

At Cambridge, he was based at the Homerton College.

His doctoral advisor was Maria Nikolajeva.

His doctoral thesis, titled Crafting, Conjuring, and the Aesthetic of Making: Towards a Materialistic Understanding of Fantasy, studies the ways in which ‘making’ - in forms such as human craftsmanship and non-human growth - impacts the creation of ‘wonder’ in the worlds of fantasy literature.

Pandey has also pursued a parallel research interest in the evolving cultural and aesthetic politics of Shimla in particular and Himachal Pradesh more generally.

Pandey has been the recipient of several scholarships and fellowships.

Among others, these include a Cambridge Commonwealth Shared Scholarship, a Cambridge International Scholarship, Charles Wallace India Trust grants, and a research support grant from the Paul Mellon Centre.

Pandey has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Yale University and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Pandey has researched and written about fantasy and children’s literature, hill stations in India, nature writing, craft theory, folk culture, cinema studies, and pop culture.

Pandey's writings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and academic anthologies.

Pandey's writings have also appeared on several Indian mass-media forums, including The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Pioneer, Frontline, Live Wire, Outlook, Quint, and Scroll.in.