Kama Maclean

Biography

Kama Maclean is Professor of History in the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg. She is also editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. A leading scholar of modern India, her first book, Pilgrimage and Power: the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, (Oxford University Press, 2008) was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Kentish Anand Coomaraswamy Prize, by the Association of Asian Studies in the USA.

In 2009, she took up a one year appointment as Professorial Research Fellow at the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain, where she began to research and write about anticolonial activism in interwar India, a project which focuses largely on the ways in which the actions of what the British called ‘the violence movement’ impacted on the broader nationalist movement. She has written several articles on this topic and her book, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text was published by Hurst & Co (London) and Oxford University Press (New York), 2015 and Penguin (New Delhi, 2016). Her third book, British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, Intercolonial Relations, and the Empire, was published by UNSW Press in 2020.