Dr. Camille Buat

Camille Buat is a historian of modern South Asia, specialising in the social and political history of 20th century north India. She completed her PhD in 2022 from Sciences Po, Paris and the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen. Her dissertation, “Matters of Settlement. Hindustani labour and the making of citizenship in India”, looked at the intersection between labour, migration and citizenship around the time of the postcolonial transition. Through the reconstruction of the trajectory of “Hindustani” migrants from the states of UP and Bihar towards Calcutta, she explored the modalities of incorporation of “internal” migrants in the political and social landscape of late colonial and early postcolonial India. This research wove together a variety of sources, spanning government reports, life and family histories, and a corpus of songs and plays in Bhojpuri, dealing with the theme of migration.

Her new project aims at constructing a social history of the postcolonial transition in rural India. It focuses more specifically on the period between the 1930s and 1960s as a moment of reconfiguration, as the political transformation associated with the advent of Independence intersected with long-term dynamics of social and economic change. The project is based on a detailed case study of the Bhojpuri region of eastern UP and western Bihar, and draws on a combination of judicial archives, literary sources and political material.

Prior to her PhD, Camille obtained an M.A. in history from the Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po, Paris. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies since 2022, where she teaches courses on the history of South Asia, labour history and social history.

Research interests: