From textiles to tourism: mill work, deindustrialization and urban change in postcolonial Pondicherry | AHRC DTP
Subject: History
School: School of History
Supervisors: Dr. Akhila Yechury, University of St. Andrews; Dr. Montserrat Lopez Jerez, University of St. Andrews.
Keywords: Deindustrialization, South Asia, labour history, urbanization, French India, oral history.
Discipline+Catalyst: Cultural & Museum Studies, History
Knowledge Exchange Hub: Citizenship, Culture & Ethics, Heritage.
About Bharat’ Research:
My research reimagines the urban history of Pondicherry,a former French colony in South India, through a historical study of deindustrialization and urban change as experienced by its working-class communities. I place analytical focus on the city’s textile workers and ask how their social identity as workers shaped their relationship to the city, and what it means to live through the decline of this once thriving industry. Drawing on archival sources, ethnographic research and oral histories, my research will attend to reverberations of this industrial “past” within a supposedly post-industrial present.
CONNECT WITH BHARAT
E-mail: bs253@st-andrews.ac.uk