Ashutosh Kumar

Ashutosh Kumar is a Full Professor of History at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. He earned his PhD from the History Department of the University of Delhi, where he also taught from 2012 to 2014. He received prestigious SEPHIS Fellowship (South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development, a Government of Netherlands funded programme) during his PhD. 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 President of Centre for Alternative Studies in Social Sciences, New Delhi.

He has published many books, and articles in international peer reviewed journals. His most recent publications include Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920, Cambridge University Press, 2017; The Indian Labour Diaspora (authored with Professor Crispin Bates), Edinburgh University Press, 2017; Indian Soldiers in the First World War: Re-visiting a Global Conflict, 1914-1918, edited with Claude Markovits, Routledge 2020; Warfare and Society in British India, 1757-1947, edited with Kaushik Roy, Routledge, 2022; and ‘Girmitiyas and Global Indian Diaspora: Origins, Memories and Identities ’ Cambridge University Press, 2024. His next book Coolinama: Lost Voices of Indentured Indians is forthcoming.