Ashutosh Kumar is an Associate Professor of History at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. He earned his Ph.D. from the History Department of the University of Delhi, where he also taught from 2012 to 2014. He received South-South Exchange Program for Research on the History of Development (SEPHIS), a Government of Netherlands funded program Fellowship during his Ph.D. He was fellow at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom; Yale University, USA; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, and at Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. He is president of Indian Association for South Asian Studies (IASAS) and Chairman of Centre for Alternative Studies in Social Sciences, New Delhi.
His most recent publications include Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920’, Cambridge University Press, 2017 and ‘Girmitiyas and Global Indian Diaspora: Origins, Memories and Identities’ Cambridge University Press, 2023.
As a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence scholar, Dr. Kumar is exploring issue of rights of Indian indentured laborers on colonial sugar plantations during nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the letters, petitions and depositions of indentured Indian migrants with a particular emphasis on the letters they wrote in regional Indian language. His project analyses such laborers’ letters and makes the case that Indian indentured laborers were able to fight for their “rights”, natural and contractual with planters and the colonial government through petitions, in addition to being able to voice their feelings and concerns on a variety of other matters.