Dr Purba Hossain

I am a historian of colonial South Asia. I hold a BA and MA from Presidency University (Kolkata, India) and a PhD from the University of Leeds. Before joining Christ's College as the G.K. Roth Research Fellow, I was a Royal Historical Society Marshall Fellow (2019-20) and an Economic History Society Tawney Fellow (2021-22).

My first book, Voices from Calcutta, is due to be published with Cambridge University Press. It shows how merchants, reformers, missionaries and educationists from colonial Calcutta – the capital of British India – shaped debates on the use of indentured labourers in Caribbean and Indian Ocean plantations. The book unfolds a complex web of letters, petitions, committee reports and news-articles, as well as under-utilised interviews of indentured Indians, to illuminate how actors from South Asia initiated sweeping new regulations and shaped understandings of labour servitude. Ultimately, it locates in Calcutta voices of protest that fundamentally shaped post-Abolition rhetoric in the British Empire.

My new project builds upon my interest in indigenous voices by focusing on the role and agency of translators, interpreters, and language informants of British India. This project has at its core a simple question: How did a monolingual British state exert power and control over its multilingual colonial subjects? It explores how translators mediated between British and Indian peoples, shaped the crucial knowledge-structures that underpinned the colonial state, and facilitated the state’s diplomatic relations with border regions.