Dr Kalathmika Natarajan

I am a Lecturer in Modern South Asian History in the Department of Archaeology and History and co-director of the Exeter South Asia Centre. My interdisciplinary research on South Asia brings together the fields of diplomatic history, migration studies, critical caste studies, and imperial and global history. My work locates histories of migration across the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean as pivotal sites to recover the centrality of caste and mobility in the making of international relations.

My first book Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class, and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67  presents a new paradigm for Indian diplomatic history by recovering the foundational histories and legacies of ‘coolie’ migrants - it has been published by Hurst in November 2025, with an American edition published by Oxford University Press in March 2026. Through multi-archival, multilingual research spanning the vast geographies of indenture and labour migration from India to Ceylon, the Caribbean, and Britain, the book argues that Indian notions of the international realm were shaped by the prolific if 'undesirable' journeys of labourers and remained a space of anxiety defined by a caste-coded paranoia over the mobility of the coolie. It thereby challenges the longstanding neglect of caste in Indian diplomatic history and provides a bottom-up approach to diplomatic studies that centres the experiences of migrants who have for too long been simply regarded as recipients and problems of diplomacy. 

With Pavan Kumar (Ambedkar University) and Vineet Thakur (Leiden University), I have co-edited a first of its kind special issue on 'Caste in Indian Diplomacy and International Relations' for the Hague Journal of Diplomacy, published in September 2025. 

I am currently working on two intertwined projects:

First, a book project titled Caste at Bay: Mobility and Anti-Caste Internationalism Across the Bay of Bengal that explores anti-caste movements and mobilities across the Bay of Bengal in the twentieth century. Drawing on multilingual literary, cinematic, and archival sources and tracing the mobilities of performers, diplomats, journalists and activists crisscrossing Madras, Ceylon, Malaya, and Burma, it offers an important intervention in histories of internationalism by centering caste.