Drawing upon 500 pages of letters and remittance records exchanged between his maternal grandfather, P.K. “Java” Raman, a typist in Batavia, and his family in Malabar, Aditya Balasubramanian (Australian National University) explores the overlooked experiences of Indian middle-class migrants in Southeast Asia and contends that migration and transnational connections persisted during the Great Depression, revealing the economic insecurities, emotional challenges, and remittance networks that linked Indians across the Bay of Bengal and across imperial boundaries.

4:00 PM (Pacific Time)
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383

November 19, 2026, 4:00 p.m.

Studies of migration across the Bay of Bengal focus largely on the movement of millions of Tamil labourers between the second half of the 19th century and the 1930s to serve the demands of British imperial capital accumulation during the first era of globalization. While connected histories of South and Southeast Asia and memory point to “a large middling group of Indians, clerks in government and private offices, doctors, drivers, lower management in the oilwells and teak sawmills,” shopkeepers, and traders (Bayly and Harper, 2005), they fail to say very much about this class of people because of their invisibility to the colonial archive. This paper begins to illuminate what has been hidden thus far. It draws chiefly on the author’s collection of 500 pages of remittances and correspondences exchanged between his maternal grandfather P.K. “Java” Raman (1909-97) who migrated to work as a typist in Batavia (today’s Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies and his family members in the Malabar region of British India, between 194. The paper suggests the Depression as a period of migration rather than its eclipse; explores structures of feeling around economic insecurity and isolation of the thin stratum of Indian professionals in Southeast Asia; and sketches an earlier history of remittance between Indians overseas and in the homeland, across empires. Looking beyond the letters, it discusses possible sources and themes for microhistories of crossing the Bay of Bengal.

Aditya Balasubramanian is a Senior Lecturer (equivalent of Associate Professor) of history at Australian National University and works on the history of political economy and environment in modern South Asia. He is the author of Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India (2023).