This talk recovers the histories and legacies of ‘coolie’ migrants as foundational to Indian diplomacy. Drawing on multi-archival research spanning the vast geographies of indenture and labour migration from India to Ceylon, the Caribbean, and Britain, it shows that Indian notions of the international realm were shaped by the prolific if ‘undesirable’ mobility of labourers and remained a space of anxiety defined by a caste-coded paranoia over the figure of the coolie. Through such a paradigm, my recent book addresses the longstanding neglect of caste and indenture in Indian diplomatic history. It provides a bottom-up approach to diplomatic studies and international relations that centres the experiences of migrants who have for too long been simply regarded as recipients and ‘problems’ of diplomacy.
Bio
Kalathmika Natarajan is Lecturer in Modern South Asian History at the University of Exeter and co-director of the Exeter South Asia Centre. Her interdisciplinary research combines critical approaches to diplomatic history and South Asian migration. She has worked at the University of Edinburgh and received her doctoral degree from the University of Copenhagen.
The event is part of the series South Asia Research Initiative, Autumn 2026.