Profile
Biography
BA, MA, PhD (Leeds)
Purba Hossain is Lecturer in Modern History (post 1800). She holds a BA and MA from Presidency University (Kolkata, India) and a PhD from the University of Leeds. Before joining York, she held research fellowships at Christ’s College Cambridge, the Institute of Historical Research (London), and the Royal Historical Society.
Purba is a historian of colonial India with an interest in how Indians negotiated life under colonial rule and contributed to imperial processes.
Research
Overview
Purba’s research focuses on life under colonialism in India, with a particular emphasis on colonial encounters and uncovering Indian voices. Purba’s first monograph, Voices from Calcutta: Indian Indenture in the Age of Abolition (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), tells the story of indentured labour migration from the perspective of Calcutta. It shows how people from colonial Calcutta – the capital of British India – shaped the lives of Indian labourers in Caribbean and Indian Ocean plantations and initiated sweeping new regulations in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery.
Her current research moves focus on to translators and language workers in British India, asking how a monolingual British state exerted power and control over its multilingual colonial subjects. It explores how Indian language workers mediated between the coloniser and the colonised, shaped the knowledge-structures that underpinned the colonial state and facilitated the state’s diplomatic relations, and yet remain unacknowledged in historical records.
Purba also enjoys collaborative research. She co-edited the 2023 book Across Colonial Lines: Commodities, Networks, and Empire Building with Dr Devyani Gupta. This book explores the entangled history of commodities and empires with case studies from across the Venetian, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British Empires. In the same year, Purba also co-curated a virtual special issue for Past & Present with Dr John Gallagher. Titled ‘Languages of History, Histories of Language’, this issue explores how language histories allow historians to challenge the primacy of the Anglophone experience, transcend area studies, and trouble the monoglot assumptions of the modern nation state. It urges historians to put language at the centre of historical analysis.
Supervision
Purba welcomes enquiries from prospective research students interested in any aspect of colonial Indian history.
Publications
Full publications list
Books
Voices from Calcutta: Indian Indenture in the Age of Abolition (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
Across Colonial Lines: Commodities, Networks, and Empire Building, ed. by Purba Hossain and Devyani Gupta (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).
Articles
(with J. Gallagher), ‘Languages of History, Histories of Language’, Past & Present, 261.1 (2023), 32-60.
‘‘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, 50.1 (2022), 52-80.
‘Protests at the Colonial Capital: Calcutta and the Global Debates on Indenture, 1836-42’, Journal of South Asian Studies, 33.1 (2017), 37-51.
Book Chapters
‘‘Docile, Quiet, Orderly’: Indian Indenture Trade and the Ideal Labourer’, in Across Colonial Lines: Commodities, Networks, and Empire Building, ed. by Devyani Gupta and Purba Hossain (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 179-98.
(with S. Mitra), ‘Protests in Print: Resistance against Indian Indentured Labour in Nineteenth Century Bengal’, in The Nation and its Margins: Rethinking Community, ed. by Aditi Chandra and Vinita Chandra (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), 90-108.
Book Reviews
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, 4.1 (2024), 153-58.
Space, Agency, Re-Migration: A Historical Geography Approach to Indian Indenture, Economic and Political Weekly, 57.49 (2022), 29-31.
