Siddharth Pandey (born 8 July 1987) is a writer, 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.
Education
Pandey obtained a BA (Hons), Masters (MA) and MPhil in English Literature from the Delhi University. 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 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.
Reception of writings
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, Live Wire, Outlook, Quint, and Scroll.in.
Indian hill stations
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."
Fantasy literature
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."
Poetry
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.