Dr V.J. Varghese (Department of History, University of Hyderabad)
Project: Taming Wilderness as Modernity: Migration, Agrarian Expansion and the Re‐making of Syrian Christians in Kerala, 1850 ‐ 1970
September - November 2018
V.J. Varghese is a historian, working on modern south India with reference to the making of regional economic modernities. As part of IASH, he would be mobilising resources towards completing his work on the transformation of the Syrian Christian community in Kerala, south India, under the weight of modernity through the routes of migrations, land reclamation and agrarian expansion. It looks at the apparently conflicting orientations - local and the imperial/global, religious and the secular, traditional and the modern & pre-political and political- involved in the production of modern subjectivies in the erstwhile colonies of the global South. He teaches at the Department of History in the School of Social Sciences, University of Hyderabad, India. He has co-authored Dreaming Mobility and Buying Vulnerability: Overseas Recruitment Practices in India (Routledge) and co-edited Anjuru Varshathe Keralam: Chila Arivadayalangal in Malayalam (Tapasam/DC Books), Migration, Mobility and Multiple Affiliations: Punjabis in a Transnational World (Cambridge University Press) apart from writing in reputed journals and contributing chapters to many edited volumes. He also held academic fellowships at the University of Sussex (2010-11), the National University of Singapore (2014) and the Central European University, Budapest (2017-18).