Kalathmika Natarajan, "Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Nov 2, 2025

Kalathmika Natarajan, a Lecturer in Modern South Asian History at the University of Exeter, dives into the complex histories of Indian migrant laborers known as 'coolies.' She unpacks how caste, class, and gender shaped their experiences and influenced Indian diplomacy. Key topics include the anxiety surrounding India's reputation, the Komagata Maru incident, and the role of sanitary rhetoric in diplomatic conflicts. Natarajan also explores the construction of the Indian diaspora, international anti-caste activism, and her unique method of using regional archives to tell these vital stories.

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INSIGHT

Coolie Figure Recast Diplomacy

The kuli figure shaped Indian diplomacy by making caste central to how the state viewed the international realm.
Diplomacy evolved to manage the stigma of 'undesirable' migrant mobility rather than solely high politics.

INSIGHT

Kuli As A Racial-Caste Lens

The term kuli collapses people into wage-objects, merging race, gender and caste in migration discourse.
Natarajan uses the term to show how caste anxieties translated into global racialized labels.

INSIGHT

Anxiety Drove Mobility Controls

Elite anxiety arose because prolific kuli mobility threatened caste hierarchies and national reputation.
The state pursued sanitizing international space by curtailing who could legitimately migrate.

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Over the centuries, millions of migrant labourers sailed from the Indian subcontinent, across the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean, to shape what is now the world’s largest diaspora. Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67 (Hearst, 2025 and Oxford UP, 2026) recovers the histories and legacies of those ‘coolie’ migrants, and presents a new paradigm for the diplomatic history of independent India, going beyond high politics to explore how indenture, emigration and international relations became entangled.

Before and after independence, Indian notions of the international realm as a sanctified space were shaped by migrant journeys; this was a space of anxiety in which to negotiate the ‘coolie stain’ on the country’s reputation. Discourse was defined by intersections of caste, class, race and gender—and framed the migrant worker as the quintessential ‘other’ of Indian diplomacy.

Drawing on rich, multi-archival analysis spanning the vast geographies of labour migration, Kalathmika Natarajan pieces together the stories of quarantine camps en route to Ceylon; cultural and educational missions in the Caribbean; discretionary passport policies in India; and the mediation of immigrant life in Britain. The result is a nuanced history from the interwar period to the decades after independence, and a critical analysis centring both caste and the negotiation of ‘undesirable’ mobility as foundational to Indian diplomacy.

About the Author:

Kalathmika Natarajan is Lecturer in Modern South Asian History at the University of Exeter. 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.

About the Host:

Stuti Roy works at Oxford University Press and is a recent graduate with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Toronto.

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