(Visiting Researcher, July 2026 – present)

Biography:

Byapti Sur received her doctorate in History from Leiden University in 2019. Her PhD thesis examined the formal and informal dynamics of the encounter between the Mughals, Indian merchants and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) officials in seventeenth-century Bengal. By juxtaposing the official discourse of the Company on the ‘corrupt’ Mughal administrators against legal cases of ‘corruption’ of VOC officials, it studied the networks that sustained connections in port cities under the institutional façade of the Company. Through the concept of ‘corruption’, it examined the position of non-European actors in the ideas and practices of the VOC.

Following her doctorate, Byapti pursued a brief fellowship at the National Archives in the Hague where she expanded her research into eighteenth-century Dutch Bengal. Through deeds of land called pattas, she studied the interactions between ordinary villagers and Dutch zamindars. As a Visiting Fellow of the CAPASIA project based at the European University Institute (Florence), she studied the Dutch factories of Bengal and the resistance of weaving communities from whom the VOC procured textiles. Currently teaching as an Assistant Professor of History at Thapar University (Punjab) she is working on an interdisciplinary project that looks into postcolonial Bangla fiction and its representation of the early-modern Europeans in Bengal.

Publications:

• Sur, Byapti, ‘Interwoven Spaces: The Dutch East India Company’s Textile Procurement in Early-Modern Bengal’, Crossroads (forthcoming)
• Schrikker, Alicia and Sur, Byapti, An Empire in Disguise: The Appropriation of Pre-Existing Modes of Governance in Dutch South Asia, 1650-1800. Law and History Review 41, 3 (2023), 427-51. (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248022000554)
• Sur, Byapti, Beyond the Company and its Commerce: Reviewing the Presence of the VOC in Mughal Bengal, 1600-1700. In eds., Raziuddin Aquil and Tilottama Mukherjee, An Earthly Paradise: Early-Modern Bengal (Delhi: Manohar Publications, 2019), 123-155.
• Sur, Byapti, Individual Interests Behind the Institutional Façade: The Dutch East India Company’s Legal Presence in Seventeenth-Century Mughal Bengal. Itinerario 42, 2 (2018), 279-94. (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115318000335)
• Sur, Byapti, The Dutch East India Company through the Local Lens: Exploring the Dynamics of Indo-Dutch Relations in Seventeenth Century Bengal. Indian Historical Review 44, 1, (2017), 62-91. (https://doi.org/10.1177/0376983617712)