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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Gazi Mizanur Rahman, "In the Malay World: A Spatial History of a Bengali Transnational Community" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Description: Gazi Mizanur Rahman’s In the Malay World: A Spatial History of a Bengali Transnational Community (Cambridge University Press, 2024) offers the first sustained historical study of Bengali migration to British Malaya from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth. Drawing on archival research in South and Southeast Asia, as well as oral histories and travel accounts, Rahman reconstructs the formation of a transnational Bengali presence that has been largely overlooked in the broader literature on Indian migration.
The book argues that Bengali migrants—across class, religion, and occupation—constituted a distinct group within the South Asian diaspora in the M...