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 diplomatic history: 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 international relations.

My first book Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy  (forthcoming with Hurst, October 2025) presents a new paradigm for Indian diplomatic history by recovering the histories and legacies of ‘coolie’ migrants. 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.

Having grown up in Tamil Nadu, I remain inspired by the many coastal migrant histories that intertwine Madras, Ceylon, Malaya, and Burma and have learnt much from interrogating Indian diplomacy and international relations from this vantage point.