Title: Articulating Estrangements and Entitlements: The Repatriation of Burmese-Indians, 1960-1980
PhD Supervisor: Gopalan Balachandran
PhD CO Supervisor: Umut Yıldırım
Expected completion date: 2026
My dissertation follows the partition of British India and British Burma in 1937 and moments of interconnections and disconnections between the two countries in the aftermath of partition. I engage with both historical and anthropological methods and literatures relating to cultural maritime histories of the Bay of Bengal, partition, mobilities and colonial and postcolonial politics and cultures of India and Burma. I am interested in exploring the trope of partition, as is popular when thinking about South Asia’s twentieth century. The dissertation asks in what other ways, other than genocidal refugee violence, can we imagine postcolonial population displacements of South Asia? I explore this question through oral histories of Indian repatriates from Burma, who returned to India, during the 1960s-80s.
Saheli Chatterjee is a doctoral student at the Department of International History and Politics. Broadly, her research interests include cultural maritime histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, borderlands in South and Southeast Asia, mobilities, spatial history, memory studies and oral history methodologies. Her thesis narrates the repatriation of the Indian minority from Burma to India during the 1960s-80s and posits repatriation as a particular form of 20th century population displacement in South Asian historiography. Saheli completed her Masters at the department in 2021 and holds a BA in History from Delhi University.
Since 2017, I have held research assistantship positions in Kolkata and New Delhi in India and at Konstanz in Germany. I have assisted projects in departments of History and Anthropology.
Before beginning my graduate studies, I have experience of working as a communications intern at the Global Protection Cluster (UNHCR) and as a research consultant at a Geneva-based organisation, the Martin Ennals Foundation.
Fully funded PhD program offered by the Department of International History and Politics, Geneva Graduate Institute. 2022-2026.