Urvi Khaitan is an RHS Marshall Fellow, 2022-23, held jointly with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Urvi’s six-month Fellowship runs from October 2022 to March 2023.

Urvi’s Oxford University thesis — ‘Women and Work in the Indian Economy: Empire, Famine, and Labour during the Second World War’ — explores how women at the margins of colonial Indian society engaged with and experienced paid work. She investigates the ways in which lower-caste and Adivasi (indigenous) women in late colonial India negotiated a turbulent wartime economy in the eastern provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Assam during the Second World War.