Mr. Hota Agni Kumar is interested in the areas of Socio-Political and Cultural History for himself and he also teaches Economic History. His major approach to history is through the context-sensitive literary sources and he wants to read them for the context-specific interpretive potential that they might carry for our times. He is interested more in the thematic concerns that cut across times than the chronological blocks such as “ancient”, medieval”, and “modern” histories and his approach to history is as genealogical as structurationist to that effect. He studies such texts as the Arthasastra and the Dharmasastras for the kind of institutions and practices that they belong to as well as address and thereby tries to identify a discourse that made them possible and elicit a parallel interpretive aspiration revealed through them at the same time.
Agni believes that while extreme relativism will not promise much interpretation of a slice of the past, an absolute lack of any reference to it cannot be called an exercise in historical discourse. Agni is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled as “Literary Modernity Between Colonial Modernity and Reform Modernity: Reading an Early Twentieth Century Telugu Play”.
He is also engaged in writing a monograph on the Arthasastra titled tentatively as “Power and Wealth in the Arthasastra”. He was also awarded ICHR (Indian Council of Historical Research) Fellowship for 2002-2003 and ICPR (Indian Council of Philosophical Research) Fellowship for 1998-2000.