Nira Wickramasinghe is Chair Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. Her books include Metallic Modern: Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka (2014) and Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History (second edition, 2015).
Slave in a Palanquin is one of the most remarkable and original works I have read on the history of the Indian Ocean. With her enormous scholarly gifts, Wickramasinghe endeavours to recover what she calls fugitive lives, a project that it as much as anything a meditation on the archive of slavery-its silences, fractures, and unexpected shards of illumination. -- Sunil Amrith, author of <i>Unruly Waters</i>