Dr Urvi Khaitan
Postdoctoral Associate Member
I am an economic and social historian researching the economics of gender in twentieth-century South Asia. In August 2023, I completed a DPhil in History at the University of Oxford. My thesis, 'Women and Work in the Indian Economy: Empire, Famine, and Labour during the Second World War' centred the working lives of women pushed to the margins of colonial Indian society by their gender and socio-economic status.
Research Interests
My research directly challenges the notion that women’s labour is episodic or marginal, arguing instead that it is central and structural to the South Asian economy. In my DPhil thesis, I used the 1940s—a period of economic turbulence marked by the Second World War and the Bengal Famine, and consequently, a time of enhanced archival visibility—as a lens to explore women’s economic agency and activity. It comprised three case studies: on women made destitute by the Bengal Famine who coped with displacement by working in unregulated military labour and in prostitution; on women’s work in coal mines and their vulnerability to changing colonial labour legislation; and experiences of work, wellbeing, and the household economy in tea plantations.
I am particularly interested in disentangling the relationship between women and work--paid and unpaid--in the longer-term continuum of the challenges of poverty and precarity in South Asia.
