Dr. Kumar Mahabi
Dr. Kumar Mahabir has recently been elected as an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (RHS) in recognition of his contribution to the history of indentureship in the Caribbean.
The RHS is one of the foremost organizations for historians in the UK and globally. It provides a platform for historians to share their research, advocates for the discipline of history in schools, museums, galleries and archives, and supports historians through publications, events and grants.
As an Associate Fellow of the RHS, Mahabir has been invited to participate in a range of the Society’s work and regular activities. In a congratulatory correspondence from University College London, RHS President, Professor Emma Griffin, welcomed him to join a supportive community of historians and to make more advances in the field of historical research and scholarship.
Mahabir is a full-time faculty member teaching anthropology in the Department of Language and Cultural Studies at the University of Guyana and a Research Fellow of The Eccles Centre for American Studies – British Library (2022-23).
About his first book, The Still Cry: Personal Accounts of East Indians in Trinidad & Tobago during Indentureship (New York, 1985), Professor Margriet Fokken of Utrecht University in the Netherlands wrote that it is a “landmark” work in the historiography of Indian indentureship in the world because Mahabir took an oral “bottom-up approach” away from the documentation and interpretation of textual reports of colonial archival materials (p. 34).
Last year, Mahabir presented a major research paper at Anton de Kom University in Suriname on the case for reparations for indentured servitude in the Caribbean and the wider Indian Diaspora.