Mikiya Koyagi
New York University
Biography
Mikiya Koyagi is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He completed his Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history at University of Texas at Austin. His current research examines local, national, and transnational sites of encounter between mobility infrastructure and heterogeneous social forces that planned, built, operated, and used it through the case of the Trans-Iranian Railway project. He also studies intra-Asian connections since the late nineteenth century, focusing particularly on the interactions between Japanese pan-Asianists and the Muslim world. His scholarship has appeared in a number of journals, including The International Journal of Middle East Studies, The Journal of World History, and The International Journal of the History of Sport.
「 Sikh Drivers in the Indo-Iranian Borderlands 」
The British construction of the Quetta-Dozdab (present-day Zahedan in the Province of Sistan and Baluchistan) railroad during World War I transformed the obscure village of Dozdab in interior Baluchistan into a nodal point of the Indo-Iranian borderlands. In the post-WWI period, various groups, including Parsee philanthropists, Shi’i pilgrims, and Sikh merchants, started to travel through Dozdab to visit Yazd, Mashhad, and other Iranian urban centers. In particular, a large number of Sikh truck drivers and merchants started to settle in Iran and played a pivotal role in the making of a new infrastructural network of railways and highways. This paper examines how this network enabled Sikh anti-colonial activities that took advantage of the weak central authority in the borderlands to connect with the global network of Indian revolutionaries.
