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Mahishan is a PhD student in the Department of History at Stanford University, where he studies the social, political, and intellectual histories of South Asian migrants across the Indian Ocean during the 19th and 20th centuries. He is particularly interested in the conjoined historical trajectories of industrial capitalism and social reform movements in the Madras Presidency, Sri Lanka, and other parts of the Tamil-speaking world. Mahishan utilizes Tamil sources and draws primarily from the archives of migrant Dalit laborers in reassessing dominant histories of international relations amidst decolonization. Prior to Stanford, Mahishan’s research in the United Kingdom and India examined the histories of Up-Country Tamil laborers in Sri Lanka and 20th century anti-caste intellectual histories in Madras/Tamil Nadu. He has ancillary interests in public history, 20th century Tamil literature, legal theory, religious studies, and the history of art.
Mahishan is a PhD student in the Department of History at Stanford University, where he studies the social, political, and intellectual histories of South Asian migrants across the Indian Ocean during the 19th and 20th centuries.
In Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Jonathan Connolly traces the normalizat…