Vaishnavi Gondane (UCL) - 2025-26 Students
ucbqvug@ucl.ac.uk

Maritime Architectures: South Asian Lascars and 19th-Century British Colonial Space

This research investigates the lives of South Asian Lascars (sailors) through a decolonial maritime architectural analysis. The project highlights the Lascars’ labour during the 1860-1900 shift to coal-powered shipping, examining their spatial, cultural, and bodily experiences. This offers a new understanding of decolonial maritime historiography.

My interdisciplinary methodology combines decolonial and environmental theories, architectural analysis, and previously unstudied Indian archives. This allows me to reconstruct the Lascars’ lived experiences within the architectural maritime spaces of their labour dominated by coal-powered environments. The research, guided by cross-departmental architectural and geography expertise, extends interdisciplinary historiography beyond Eurocentric canons and legal-historical Lascar studies.

Principal supervisor: Prof. Peg Rawes