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, and imperial and global history. I am interested in critical, bottom-up approaches to diplomacy: my work locates histories of labour migration across the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean as pivotal sites through which to recover the centrality of caste 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 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. In so doing, It 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 far too long been simply regarded as the 'recipients' 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 collaborative, interdisciplinary project titled ‘Global History of Repatriation: Migration, Mobility, and the Spectre of ‘Return’ across the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean‘. This project moves beyond the dominant focus on (e)migration to foreground prolific histories of repatriation and ‘return’ across South Asia, South-east Asia, South Africa, Guyana, and Fiji through the late colonial and early postcolonial periods (1871-1973).

The second is a book tentatively titled Caste at Bay that explores anti-caste movements and mobilities across the Bay of Bengal. Drawing on a range of literary, cinematic, and archival sources in Tamil and English and tracing the mobilities of performers, diplomats, journalists, and activists, I examine histories of caste, migration, and resistance that intertwine Madras, Ceylon, Malaya, and Burma.