Dr Kalathmika Natarajan

I am a Lecturer in Modern South Asian History in the Department of Archaeology and History. My interdisciplinary research on South Asia brings together the fields of migration studies, diplomatic history, and imperial and global history. I am interested in critical, bottom-up approaches to diplomatic history and international relations: my work locates histories of labour migration across the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean as central to the making of Indian postcolonial diplomacy. I am also co-director of the Exeter South Asia Centre.

I am currently working on my book Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy (forthcoming with Hurst) which presents a new paradigm for Indian diplomatic history by recovering the histories and legacies of ‘coolie’ migrants. Through multi-archival research spanning the vast geographies of labour migration from India to Ceylon, the Caribbean, and Britain, the book argues that Indian notions of the ‘international’ realm were shaped by these journeys of migrants and remained a space of anxiety defined by a caste-coded paranoia over the mobility of the ‘coolie’.

Having grown up in Tamil Nadu, I remain besotted with 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.