Dr Purba Hossain
Please note that Purba has left Cambridge and joined the University of York. Please follow the link to her York profile for contact details.
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.
Contact
Tags & Themes
Books
Voices from Calcutta: Labour, Migration and Indian Indenture in the Age of Abolition (under contract with Cambridge University Press).
(with Devyani Gupta) Across Colonial Lines: Commodities, Networks and Empire Building (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).
Articles and Book Chapters
Review of: Kala Pani Crossings: Revisiting 19th Century Migrations from India’s Perspective, edited by Ashutosh Bhardwaj and Judith Misrahi-Barak, Journal of Indentureship and its Legacies (forthcoming).
(with John Gallagher) 'Languages of History, Histories of Language', Past and Present, virtual special issue (2023).
‘‘Docile, Quiet, Orderly’: Indian Indenture Trade and the Ideal Labourer’, in Across Colonial Lines: Commodities, Networks, and Empire Building, edited by Devyani Gupta and Purba Hossain (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 179-98.
‘Space, Agency, Re-Migration: A Historical Geography Approach to Indian Indenture’, Economic and Political Weekly 57, no. 49 (December 2022), 29-31.
‘‘A Matter of Doubt and Uncertainty’: John Gladstone and the Post-Slavery Framework of Labour in the British Empire’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 50, no. 1 (2021), 52-80.
(with Sudipto Mitra) ‘Protests in Print: Resistance against Indian Indentured Labour in Nineteenth Century Bengal’ in The Nation and its Margins: Rethinking Community, edited by Aditi Chandra and Vinita Chandra (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), 90-108.
‘Protests at the Colonial Capital: Calcutta and the Global Debates on Indenture, 1836-42’, South Asian Studies 33, no.1 (2017), 37-51.