13639 results in South Asian history
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14 - Opposing the Group Areas Act and Resisting Forced Displacement in Durban, South Africa
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- By Brij Maharaj
- Edited by Crispin Bates, The University of Edinburgh, UK
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- Beyond Indenture
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Summary
The implementation of apartheid in South Africa centred to a large extent on the control of residential location. One of the cornerstones of apartheid and one of the few areas in which the policy has been effective was in the provision of separate residential areas for the different race groups. This spatial segregation and segmentation of residential areas for whites, Coloureds, Indians and Africans expressed the impact of apartheid most acutely. The Group Areas Act (GAA), 1950, was one of the key instruments used to reinforce the ideology of apartheid and emphasised separate residential areas, educational services and other amenities for the different race groups.
The major impact of group area dislocations has been borne by black communities, particularly Coloureds and Indians. According to Johannes T. Schoombee, ‘the actual legislative model taken for group areas has been the string of legislative measures starting in the 1880s directed against “Asiatics” [particularly Indians] in the Transvaal and later, Natal’.
Indians represent the smallest proportion of the four population groups in South Africa, numbering about one million. Yet, proportionately, the impact of the GAA ‘has been borne most heavily by the Indians, with one in four of them having been resettled’. Indians ‘suffered the most from the implementation of the GAA, either through removals or the inadequate provision of living space’. This was especially so in the port city of Durban, situated on the east coast of South Africa, where indentured labourers from India first disembarked in 1860 and who were followed by traders (or passengers who paid their own way) in the mid-1870s.
This chapter is a continuation of my earlier historical research on the GAA in Durban. The focus of the chapter is on opposition to the GAA and resistance to forced displacement. The reasons for the failure of resistance is also analysed. The chapter is divided into three sections. The background and context are presented in the first section. Opposing the GAA is the theme of the second section. Resisting forced displacement is discussed in the third section, and the sub-themes include the approaches of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC), the Natal Indian Organisation (NIO), the ‘All-in-Congress’, and the 1958 proclamations and mass action.
The data for this chapter were derived from a variety of primary documentary sources, ranging from official central and local government records and newspaper reports to memoranda prepared by political and civil society organisations.
9 - Intimate Lives on Rubber Plantations: The Textures of Indian Coolie Relations in British Malaya
- Edited by Crispin Bates, The University of Edinburgh, UK
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Summary
On 13 September 1935, Muthusamy, an Indian coolie from the Haron Estate, Klang, in British Malaya (henceforth Malaya), was charged with enticing away a married woman, Thavakka, who was a coolie and the wife of Rengasamy, another coolie at the same estate. During the trial, it was established that Rengasamy married Thavakka in India in 1927, just before they arrived in Malaya at the Haron Estate. In his statement, Rengasamy claimed that Muthusamy had begun taking his meals with the couple from August 1934, and in March 1935 the latter enticed Thavakka away from him. Muthusamy, on the contrary, claimed that during the previous year he had been depositing all his earnings with Rengasamy for safe keeping, and in March 1935, when he demanded the money back from Rengasamy, the latter offered his wife instead of the money. Furthermore, Muthusamy tried to establish that he had initially refused the offer, but upon the pleas and eagerness of Thavakka, he agreed, and they proceeded to an estate in Ipoh where they began to live as ‘husband and wife’. After hearing the case, the magistrate convicted Muthusamy and sentenced him to three years of rigorous imprisonment.
The investigation and verdict on the Muthusamy and Rengasamy case was covered in a number of local newspapers, as were most ‘enticement’ cases in Malaya. Such cases were not uncommon in transnational migrant labour communities in colonial plantation societies. Colonial administrators, while dealing with incidences of domestic trouble, kidnapping, crimes of passion and other misdemeanors often used stereotypical labels of ‘victim’ and ‘enticer’ to categorise colonised subjects, but stereotyping did not always prove helpful for either administrators or their subjects. The frequent recurrence of incidents involving acts of ‘wife enticement’3, sexual jealousy and partner or spouse desertion amongst immigrant Indian coolies in Malaya sparked intense debate amongst colonial administrators both in India and Malaya from 1900 to 1940. The discourses that arose in the wake of such incidents offer many clues about the nature of Indian coolie life in British Malaya, particularly the nature of intimate gender relations.
Due largely to the demographics of early Indian immigration, historical research on Indian coolies in Malaya has tended to focus on male immigrants and their work as coolies, kanganis and chettiars. This emphasis has resulted in complete silence regarding Indian coolie women or gender relations between coolie migrants within colonial plantation societies.
2 - Sifting Sir Syed’s legacy: From the ‘arsenal of Muslim India’ to a symbol of India’s national integration?
- Laurence Gautier, Centre de Sciences Humaines
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- Between Nation and ‘Community'
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To me the work at Aligarh signified no less than the handling at one of the most significant centres of the chief problem with which Indian statesmanship is faced—the problem of an integrated nationhood in a secular democratic state…. The despondent Muslim masses are scattered all over the country. We can dissipate the efforts to revive hope and faith in them. But if we do something significant at Aligarh it can electrify them.
—Zakir Husain to Rajendra Prasad, 19 July 19501After independence, the Indian government tended to project JMI primarily as an experimental institution à la Gandhi, focused on basic education and social reform. Although religion played a central part in JMI's ethos, the government was more likely to compare JMI to Visva Bharati, Tagore's experimental school in rural Bengal, than to AMU. AMU, by contrast, appeared to be the Muslim university par excellence. For many Muslims, it was a source of pride and a symbol of Indian Muslim culture. The institution epitomised Sayyid Ahmad Khan's efforts to uplift the community and preserve the legacy of the glorious Mughal past. However, due to the widespread support of teachers and students for the Muslim League in the 1940s, the university also came to be seen, in certain quarters, as a symbol of Muslim separatism. Long after the riots had ceased, it remained a lieu de mémoire of partition, crystallising resentment against Muslims’ supposedly communal and disloyal attitude.
Despite this prejudice, Zakir Husain strongly believed that AMU could contribute, more than JMI, to the development of an ‘integrated nationhood’. It was precisely because of its legacy as a centre of Muslim politics and educational reform that the university could, he believed, channel the efforts to ‘revive hope and faith’ among the ‘despondent Muslim masses’ and help them feel part of India's ‘secular democratic state’.
A few Congress leaders, particularly Nehru and Azad, shared a similar vision of the university's mission in post-independence India. In 1951, AMU became, along with Banaras Hindu University (BHU), one of the three central universities under the control of the central government. For Nehru, it was essential to ensure that, despite partition, Indian Muslims would feel part of the Indian nation in order to build a secular stat
1 - Negotiating Power in Colonial Natal: Indentured Migrants in Natal, 1860–1911
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- By Goolam Vahed
- Edited by Crispin Bates, The University of Edinburgh, UK
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Summary
The Power of a Man is his present means to obtain some future apparent Good.
—Thomas HobbesWhere there is power, there is resistance and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.
—Michel FoucaultMen make history, but they do not make it just as they please.
—Karl MarxThe British colony of Natal imported just over 152,000 indentured migrants between 1860 and 1911 to work on its railways, municipalities, coal mines and sugar plantations. The indigenous Zulu population had access to land at mission stations at reserves and through private companies, and resisted absorption into the racist capitalist economy for as long as they could. Therefore, despite the large indigenous Zulu population, white settlers turned to Indian labour. The indentured migrated for a variety of reasons. These ran the gamut from demographic and economic dislocation resulting from British colonialism to being a widow or outcast or perhaps simply possessing a desire to travel. Notwithstanding claims of duping and false representation, the many examples of return migration, (re)migration to different colonies and chain migration suggest that at least some of the indentured were consciously undertaking the journey and had a reasonable idea of what they were getting into.
Colonial societies and their plantations specifically were structured around power. Hobbes is cited in the epigraph because of his emphasis on the centrality of absolute power in human relations, while Marx’s domination–repression conception of power sees power as residing in the bourgeoisie and a process of constant struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The concept of power is highly contested in the social sciences. Broadly speaking, however, there is a difference between those who see power as an ‘exercise of power-over’ and those who define it as a ‘power-to-do’. Max Weber, for example, defines power as ‘the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance’. Foucault has a similar perspective: ‘if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others’. The power-to-do conception, as Hanna Pitkin explains, means that ‘power is a something’ – anything – which makes or renders somebody able to do, capable of doing something. Power is capacity, potential, ability or wherewithal.
5 - Ageing Girmitiyas and The Story of Salt Behind The Sugar
- Edited by Ashutosh Kumar, Banaras Hindu University, India, Crispin Bates, University of Edinburgh
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- <i>Girmitiyas</i> and the Global Indian Diaspora
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Summary
Old age and ageing are categories that can ground anthropological reflection on ways of living. Anthropological inquiries into old age have also contributed to ethnographic practice: participant observation, the use of biographies, individual trajectories and audio-visual narratives form part of the research legacy of anthropological literature on old age. Evolving forms of social and spiritual care for geriatric needs reflect complex and diverse transformations in any era. This chapter points out that the existing literature on plantationbased indentured Indians is yet to feature detailed studies on ageing and the factors that may have accelerated the process. Additionally, there is a dearth of studies on the social-care networks that came into being to provide for the elderly once the indenture system was abolished and/or free living outside of the plantations started. While striving to fill this gap, this chapter endeavours to open up themes for further research.
RETHINKING ‘AGEING’ AMONG THE GIRMITIYAS
In the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, the indenture system was used to recruit Asian workers for employment elsewhere in the European colonies. Despite the end of slavery, the British Empire's quest to make sugar and keep it profitable continued. It was a major source of governmental revenue, and consumer demand increased as the masses developed a taste for this labourintensive commodity, using it to sweeten tea and coffee all over Europe. As a layered, divisive and discriminatory process, indenture steadily revealed the global division of labour as well as the scale of exploitation of the body that went along with it. The physical sweat and toil accompanied by regimes of bodily control not only became the salt behind the success story of sugar production, but, I argue, these factors also hold the key to understanding the problems of ageing among the indentured and ex-indentured population.
Ageing in an era when longevity (as we know it now) was yet to be established as a fairly probable norm, provides us with a compelling context. The colonial perception of ‘ageing’ under indenture was shaped by economic needs: in the plantation system, older workers were a burden or a liability. Able-bodied individuals likely to perform well under harsh tropical conditions were preferred. Thirty-five was considered too old to re-migrate. Many aspiring migrants were rejected on ‘account of old age or some bodily infirmity’.
Part I - Origins
- Edited by Ashutosh Kumar, Banaras Hindu University, India, Crispin Bates, University of Edinburgh
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6 - Bastions of Islam: The defence of Islam as a narrative of empowerment and contestation
- Laurence Gautier, Centre de Sciences Humaines
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- Between Nation and ‘Community'
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In her ethnographic survey conducted in Aligarh city in the mid-1980s, the anthropologist Elisabeth Mann noted:
Islam nowadays has the potential to serve as a rallying point for those who see themselves as betrayed by their elites, persecuted for the creation of the two Pakistans in 1947, suspected by a growing Hindu chauvinistic militancy, and taken advantage of by unscrupulous and cynical politicians.
Mann was quick to remind the reader that tensions remained rife between Aligarh's Muslim elites and non-elites. However, she also recognised that external pressures—the constant suspicion of their loyalty since partition and, increasingly in the 1980s, the sharp rise of Hindu communalism—reinforced a sense of collective identity among co-religionists. In this context, she suggested that invoking Islam could serve as a ‘refuge for the persecuted’. What this chapter will argue is that it could also serve as a language of contestation and empowerment in a context perceived as increasingly hostile.
The 1980s saw a resurgence of communal tensions in India, fed by the development of identity politics. Following the Congress’ crushing defeat in 1977, political competition intensified at the centre, boosting opposition parties that spoke the language of caste or religion to mobilise their constituencies. Although these evolutions were already under way by the 1960s, it was mostly after the emergency that they became prominent at the national level, leading to a shift in norms from national unity to group-based interests in the mainstream political discourse. Other domestic and transnational evolutions accentuated communal tensions. Within India, reports of Muslims’ demographic growth enhanced a sense of insecurity among some sections of the Hindu population. So too did the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, particularly in neighbouring Pakistan under Zia-ul-Haq. The boom of Gulf economies added to these tensions as part of the Hindu population feared that oil money may fund mass conversions to Islam and ‘give to Islamism in India a new glow of self-confidence in one sudden sweep’. These evolutions fed into the ‘vulnerability syndrome’ of the majority population that boosted the rise of the Hindu right.
1 - ‘Coolie Catching’: The Recruitment of Indentured Women to Colonial Natal
- Edited by Ashutosh Kumar, Banaras Hindu University, India, Crispin Bates, University of Edinburgh
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In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, labour migration led to the settlement of Indians throughout the British Empire. Fiji, Mauritius, British Guyana and South Africa became key labour procuring colonies. Thousands of men, women and children crossed the oceans to work on plantations and estates under contracts of indenture. Studies on indentured migration are well documented. Its gendered aspects have been the subject of research examining issues such as mobility, agency, resistance and citizenship. In most instances, the gendered experiences of indenture are discussed in the place of destination – that is, life on the plantations and estates. However, the narratives around recruitment practices concerning women immigrants have primarily been an untapped area of analysis.
Carter, Lal, Hoefte and Reddock have alluded to some aspects in their studies of women indentured immigrants to Mauritius, Fiji and the Caribbean, examining colonial attitudes towards women as well as the role of women recruiters in labour mobilization to the colonies. In South African historiography, while several publications have explored varied aspects of female experiences in the migration process, no extensive study has been done on the recruitment practices surrounding women's migration to Natal. This gap is explored in this chapter. The unequal ratio between men and women labourers migrating to Natal created many problems for recruiting agents, colonial officials and employers. Securing the 40 per cent set quota for women immigrants was at times hampered by socio-economic conditions in India, depot medical examinations and colonial attitudes towards female labour. An analysis of these aspects of indenture will provide rich insights into recruitment practices and procedures concerning women immigrants to Natal and the factors that shaped their decision to migrate.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Indentured immigration to Natal began in 1860 at the request of sugar planters. In 1874, the Natal government agreed to indenture labourers from the southern and northern areas of India. They entered a contractual agreement for five years. Those who re-indentured were entitled to claim a return passage to India or a small piece of land for settlement after 10 years. Many immigrants took advantage of this concession, and by 1891 it is estimated that there were approximately 30,000 Free Indians in Natal. However, they, together with ‘passenger’ Indians, began to compete with the colonialists in trade and agriculture and soon generated widespread protests in the colony.
I - Agency and Resistance
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Index
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8 - On the Move: Remigration in the Indian Ocean, 1850–1906
- Edited by Crispin Bates, The University of Edinburgh, UK
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Summary
On 21 September 1909, the acting protector of immigrants in Mauritius wrote to the Inspector General of Police of the colony the following about Boodhun, who was now living in Seychelles:
I am informed by the bearer of the letter that an old immigrant named Boodhun who had left the colony [Mauritius] for Seychelles has returned & was on board the French Mail and that is considered as an undesirable & prevented from landing. It is to my knowledge that his son is a labourer in the service of the Beau Bassin & Rose Hill Board [in Mauritius] & he has asked me to interfere to get his father’s [repeal] … as he is willing to receive & to maintain him at his expense. In these circumstances, I hope you will issue orders accordingly.
The aforementioned story is an illustration of remigration – that is, mobility – between supposedly minor colonies without returning to India. Boodhun, an indentured worker from India, had completed his contract of five years, had probably spent many more years in Mauritius and had eventually become an ‘old immigrant’. Time and familiarity in Mauritius had shaped his information networks in such a way that he was aware of the populations in neighbouring colonies such as Seychelles. Colonial discourse emphasises how he was ‘undesirable’ in Mauritius, thus possibly rendering Seychelles a refuge for all unwanted immigrants. However, this could not be further from the truth since Seychelles had a significant population of 22,409 persons in 1909 and was a major exporter of vanilla and coconut oil.
The presence of Boodhun in Seychelles is not to reify the exotic undertones of islands as spaces of violence, disease or penalisation. Rather, his presence suggests the economic possibilities that remigrants pursued, despite the constraints of colonial administrations (here, those of Seychelles and Mauritius). This chapter uses passenger logs and colonial reports to examine Indian labour remigration within various nodes of the Indian Ocean between 1847 and 1906. Remigration, as pointed out earlier, refers to the process whereby labour migrants moved across colonies (and their dependencies) without returning to India or making the three main ports of embarkation (Calcutta, Madras and Bombay [present-day Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai, respectively]) the points of departure. The chapter further queries the profiles of those who pursued remigration and their motivations.
Dedication
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Introduction
- Laurence Gautier, Centre de Sciences Humaines
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Can a Muslim university be an Indian university? In his landmark article ‘Can a Muslim Be an Indian?’ Gyanendra Pandey draws a revealing comparison between two common expressions—Hindu nationalists and nationalist Muslims. While Hindus are considered to be ‘natural’ Indians, who are nationalist by default—Hindu nationalism being one brand of nationalism— Indian Muslims are taken to be primarily Muslims, whatever their political stance may be. Unlike Hindus, their commitment to the nation cannot be taken for granted; it has to be proven, for their Muslimness casts doubt on their Indianness.
Similar apprehensions affect Muslim institutions, including universities. By Muslim universities, I refer to institutions established by Muslim individuals or organisations, primarily—though not exclusively—for Muslim students. Unlike madrasas, these universities offer mostly non-religious education along the same lines as other non-Muslim universities. Therefore, their ‘Muslim’ character rests on their foundation's history and on their Muslim-majority population, much more than on their educational programmes. Visible Islamic symbols, such as mosques or tombs, may act as reminders of this character; so too can students, teachers and administrators’ frequent allusions to the need to preserve and promote ‘Muslim culture’. However, there is no consensus on either the interpretation of ‘Muslim culture’ among university members or how and to what extent it should frame life on campus.
For many external observers, there seems to be a fundamental tension between these universities’ Muslim character and their capacity, or even their willingness to serve the nation. These apprehensions, inherited from partition, surfaced again recently during the debates around the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). In December 2019, a wave of protests broke out across India when the parliament adopted this Act, which introduced, for the first time, a religious criterion in the rules of access to Indian citizenship. On 15 December, amidst growing student mobilisation, police forces stormed into two of India's prime universities—Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) and Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). These two institutions had one clear common denominator: they were both Muslim universities. For part of the press and the political body, this was reason enough to suspect a ‘jihadi’ influence behind students’ protests.
Appendix
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1. Nizam of Hyderabad, 10 lakhs (lkhs)
2. Nawab of Bahawalpur, 2 lkhs
3. Nawab of Bhopal, 1 lkh
4. Ruler of Khairpur, 1 lkh
5. Aga Khan, 1 lkh
6. Holiness Mulla Tahir Saifuddin, 1 lkh
7. Ruler of Junagadh, 1 lkh
8. Nawab of Malerkotla, 50,000
9. Maharaja of Darbhanga, 50,000
10. Maharaja of Kashmere, 25,000
11. Maharaja of Bikaner, 20,000
12. Maharaja of Jodhpur, 50,000
13. Bhikampur Estate, Aligarh, 25,000
14. Ruler of Zanjira, 15,000
15. Ruler of Mangrol (Kathiawar), 22,000
16. Mahraja of Ratlam, 10,000
17. Lady Haroon, Karachi, 10,000
18. Raja Saheb Jahangirabad, 10,000
19. Hafiz Md Siddq Sb Rais, Cawnpore, 50,000
20. Haji Md Hamza Sb Rais, Cawnpore, 10,000
21. Ali Janab Nawab Saheb, Dojana, 10,000
22. Nawab of Tonk, 20,000
23. Haji Shah Md Din Sb Rais, Gujrar, 20,000
24. Sir Sorab Saklatvala, Chairman, Dorabji Tata Trust, Bombay, 10,000
25. Mr. Rusi Mistri, Bombay, 25,000 (plus one ring worth 60,000)
26. Haji Habib Tar Md Janoo, Bombay, 10,000
27. Haji Uusuf Sueleman Botawala Charities, Bombay, 25,000
28. Haji Abdul Wahab Sb, Delhi, 10,000
29. Mr. Ispahani Calcutta, 25,000
30. S.A. Latif, Calcutta, 10,000
31. Mr. Ferozuddin, Calcutta, 10,000
32. K.S. Wachal Molla, Calcutta, 10,000
33. Seth Adamji Haji Daud, Calcutta, 25,000
34. S.M. Hanif, Calcutta, 25,000
35. Dawood Yakoob Gandhi, Calcutta, 25,000
36. G.A. Randeria Ltd, Calcutta, 10,000
37. A.G. Mohammad, Calcutta, 10,000
38. Mahboob Chowdhury, Calcutta, 10,000
39. S. Rehman, Calcutta, 10,000
40. Sueleman Chowdhury, 11,000
41. K.B. Farid Ad Chowhury (sic) Chittagong, 25,000
42. Ismail Haji Isa Sait, Cochin, 15,000
43. M.K. Macker Pillay Esq, Alwaya, 15,00
4 - Resisting minority politics, holding on to composite nationalism: Jamia Millia Islamia in the post-Nehruvian period
- Laurence Gautier, Centre de Sciences Humaines
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The campaign for AMU's minority status propelled the university to the forefront of Muslim politics in the 1960s and 1970s, making AMU's status one of the key ‘Muslim issues’ of the period. By pressing for the recognition of Muslims’ minority rights, the campaign revealed the limits of the so-called Nehruvian consensus. It highlighted the difficulty of transcending religion-based differences in a context where notions of majority and minority continued to mediate conceptions of the nation—among the population as well as among state actors—and to shape state policies on the ground.
Yet the demands for religious minority rights continued to suffer from a ‘justificatory deficit’: many state actors continued to see them as threats to the nation's unity and to its secular Constitution. In this context, Muslim groups at AMU and JMI sought alternative, more legitimate discursive frameworks to claim support from the state and to defend their conceptions of the nation and citizenship. The following chapters will examine the different discursive frameworks that emerged within and around Muslim universities in response to the rise of minority politics in the post-Nehruvian period. In this way, the book questions the simplistic notion that secular nationalist politics gradually gave way—from the 1960s onwards—to communal identity-based politics. To start with, the book has shown in the preceding chapters that there was no consensus around the secular nationalist discourse, even under Nehru. The next chapters will highlight the different forms of resistance to minority politics that developed within Muslim universities in the subsequent period. These resistances did not usually come from a purely areligious standpoint. As we will see, they often stemmed from competing—yet sometimes overlapping— understandings of Muslim identity. We may argue, drawing inspiration from Barbara Metcalf, that Indian Muslimness ‘offered a wide range of orientations, not one single stance’. The comparison between AMU and JMI further allows us to highlight differences of rhythm in the evolution of the dominant discursive frameworks in these two institutions. Muslim politics was neither monolithic nor did it unfold in a homogeneous time. One therefore has to bear in mind the differences in institutional cultures, proximity to power, regional anchorage and visibility in the public sphere to account for the diachronic evolutions at AMU and JMI.
Bibliography
- Laurence Gautier, Centre de Sciences Humaines
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Contents
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16 - New and Old Diasporas of South South Asia: Sri Lanka and Cyber-Nationalism in Malaysia
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Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in the translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.…
[W]e will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.
—Salman RushdieIntroduced following the official abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1833, Indian indentured labour migration in turn came largely to an end by the end of First World War. By the time of its abolition, millions from the Indian subcontinent had shipped across the Indian Ocean and around the globe. Many were ‘free migrants’, or so-called passenger Indians, but others had signed an agreement to perform contract labour as indentured workers for three to five years in colonial plantations, on railways or roads, or in construction work. Whether in neighbouring Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) and Malaya (present-day Malaysia) or further afield in Fiji, Africa or the Americas, from Jamaica to Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, to Surinam in South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Mauritius, first-generation ‘coolies’ – the name given to bonded labour migrants and those recruited under the kangani system (where free migrants were recruited by Indian intermediaries) – courageously journeyed for the larger part of a century, first by sail and then by steamship, to live and labour in far-off lands.
Indentured and free labour migrants from India and their descendants, who worked in the lucrative sugar, rubber, cotton, coffee, cocoa and tea plantations in the tropics of the world, played an essential role in the development of the modern world and the functioning of global capitalism, as Crispin Bates, Adam Mckeown and Sunil Amrith have noted. Yet the oral history and literary record of generations of Indian indentured diasporic communities echo narratives of social suffering. They describe the struggle for agency against victimhood within the colonial plantation economies. Their literature and songs detail loss and longing for an increasingly ‘imaginary homeland’, similar to those portrayed in the writings of African American descendants of the transatlantic slave trade.
List of tables
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- 15 April 2024
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- 04 July 2024, pp xiii-xiv
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