Camille Buat

My PhD project explores patterns of labour mobility linking up the Northern Indian regions of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, on the one hand, to Eastern India (Bengal and Assam) from the second half of the 19th century to the present. Building on life and family histories, it follows these mobile trajectories through time, as they straddled geographical and occupational mobility, in a constant back and forth between their "home" in Eastern UP (Ghazipur, Ballia, Buxar), Bengal (Howrah, Durgapur, Asansol, Titagarh) and Assam (Dibrugarh, Tinsukia, ...). In the field of cultural representations, the Bidesiya tradition, built around the theme of the absent husband, gone away to a distant land for work, constitutes a core theme of folk songs and plays in these regions, and allows to trace the representation of mobile practices in the longue durée, through shifts and changes in media of cultural production.

I am completing my PhD at CeMIS and the Center of History, Sciences Po, Paris, France. Prior to the PhD, I completed a masters in History from Sciences Po entitled Communalism and Militancy: Indian Jute Labour in the 1930s: a Segmented Labour Force.

Publications

Book review “Vanessa Caru. Des toits sur la grève. Le lodgement des travailleurs et la question sociale à Bombay (1850-1950), International Review of Social History, Vol. 62, Issue 1, April 2017, pp. 156-158

Book review “Jean Louis Margolin et Claude Markovits, Les Indes et l’Europe: histoires connectées XVe XXIe siècle”, in Vingtième Siècle, 2016/4 (no. 132)