Dr Purba Hossain

Purba Hossain is a historian of colonial South Asia. She holds a BA and MA from Presidency University (Kolkata, India) and a PhD from the University of Leeds, and has previously held fellowships awarded by the Royal Historical Society and the Economic History Society. Her doctoral project explored how voices from Calcutta (India) shaped debates on the employment of Indian indentured labourers in Caribbean and Indian Ocean plantations. Her current research builds upon her interest in indigenous voices by focusing on the role and agency of translators, interpreters, and language informants of British India. 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.