Sana Aiyar

Sana Aiyar is Professor of History at MIT. Her broad research and teaching interests lie in the regional and transnational history of South Asia and South Asian diasporas, with a particular focus on colonial and postcolonial politics and society across the Indian Ocean. Her first book, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2015), explores the politics of migration, diaspora, race, and anticolonial nationalism among South Asians in Kenya from c. 1895 to 1968. Her second book, Burma’s South Asian Past: Sacred Geographies and Political Communities (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) recovers the shared history of Burma and India’s quest for religious and political sovereignty against colonial rule and the rise of Hindu and Buddhist nationalism Burma and India in the 1920s and 30s. She is also Research Director of South Asia and the Institute: Transformative Connections a public history exhibition that showcases the longstanding connections between MIT and South Asia that go back to 1880. South Asia and the Institute has been exhibited at MIT, IIT-Madras, the Science Gallery Bengaluru, and the Jaipur Literary Festival at the Asia Society, New York. It received the 2023 Great Dome Award from the MIT Alumni Society. 

Sana Aiyar is an alumnae of St Stephen’s College, Delhi University, the University of Cambridge, and Harvard University. She was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and Assistant Professor of South Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before joining MIT in 2013.

Additional Works

Colonialism’s Afterlives and Invocations of Oceanic History

Peter Kimani, Dance of the Jacaranda

Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean: The Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Kenya, ca. 1930–1950

Empire, Race, and the Indians in Colonial Kenya’s Contested Public Political Sphere, , 1919–1923

Fazlul Huq, Region and Religion in Bengal: The Forgotten Alternative of 1940–43

Revolutionaries, Maulvis, Swamis, and Monks: Burma’s Khilafat Movement

Out of India: East Africa and its South Asian Diasporas

Race, Rebellion, and Photos in Kenya

SAA Oral History Project: An Overview

In the News

AHA Member Spotlight: Sana Aiyar

Bringing figures in anticolonial politics out of the shadows

MIT affiliates sign statement against Citizenship Amendment Act

Teach-In – Working Across Boundaries: Studying the Indian Ocean World through Space and Time

Submitting your work to the AHR Podcast

South Asians and Black Lives Matter Webinar Hosted by MIT South Asian Alumni Association

New Books Network Podcast:  Indians in Kenya: The-Politics of Diaspora with Prof. Sana Aiyar

Exploring generations of influence between South Asia and MIT