The Moment of Departure – Coolie Choices and Voices

The testimonies of migrants frequently bear witness to a pre-existing decision to look for work away from their native village, to join the armies of rural Indians tramping the roads looking for seasonal employment, before the fateful meeting with a recruiter that was to lead them much further afield, to a distant colony.

Césaire, Négritude and Coolitude

MC: You had a very interesting encounter with Aimé Césaire, the great poet from Martinique who coined the word négritude, in December 1997. What is the link between négritude and coolitude?

KT: Aimé Césaire invented the word négritude in the 1920s, in the midst of colonial turmoil. Coolitude was framed in 1992. There are two principal similarities between négritude and coolitude:

1. – The recollection of a common phase of history and the need to redress the state of oblivion and neglect attached to the condition of the Negro, and to that of the Coolie. The descendants of indentured labourers, like those of slaves, often knew very little of their past history. They were ignorant of the cultural implications of the Voyage. One of the aims of coolitude is also to foster a larger community of vision encompassing the experiences of people of African descent and fostering interaction with the later immigrant groups in those colonial societies, to which coolies migrated in the period immediately following the abolition of slavery, even though Indian labour was already present during slavery. […]

Poetic texts in prose

Coolitude: because my country heaves with new traces of memory. And if negro gestures come to our hands as we cut the canes, there remains in us those movements of fingers used to the tabla and which the ravanne often harmonised in the great cry of hearts left to wander.

From Négritude to Créolité

Black US intellectuals like W E B Du Bois and Booker T Washington are credited with the commencement of black studies. Activists, like Marcus Garvey, took up their work whose stand against discrimination and injustice gave a new drive to the movement of black consciousness. Négritude is the francophone equivalent, and dates from the launch of L'Etudiant Noir in 1934 by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sedar Sengor and Léon Gontran Damas.

In most of the colonies to which indentured Indians migrated, and where subsequent or pre-existing mercantile communities from India also settled, the latter made strenuous efforts to disassociate themselves from the negatively stereotyped ‘coolie’. For example, in 1888 a group of Indian merchants in Johannesburg urged the government to resist agitators who sought ‘to class your petitioners with Arabs, Coolies, or Chinese not suitable to do business in this State … your petitioners assure your Excellencies that they are none of these people and have nothing in common with them.’

This volume has sought to rediscover the coolie, firstly through an exploration of the stereotypes which evolved about the Indian labour migrant in official documents and in the early literature, and secondly through an assessment of more recent writing which has explored Indian identities in diaspora. The purpose of this exploration has been to redefine and reappropriate the concept of the coolie. Through coolitude, an articulation and an evocation of the Indian labour diaspora, the coolie can effectively be revoiced. Contemporary texts which described – and often distorted – our image of the coolie, whether travellers' observations or accounts of colonists and residents of the territories to which Indians migrated, have been characterized by exoticism.

Contemporary Views of the Coolie

The overseas Indian labourer entered the perception of the colonial planter and administrator in the early decades of the nineteenth century as it became clear, from increasing agitation in Britain, that slavery as a system was doomed. Intellectuals of the period, however, were convinced that European men were constitutionally incapable of dealing with labour in tropical climates. Earl Grey's comments typify the thinking of the period on this matter:

Late in February 1856, the city of Moscow gave a hero's welcome to some of the naval defenders of Sevastopol. By this time Russian diplomats were already in Paris working on the peace treaty that would end the war.Alexander had finally heeded the advice of his Foreign Minister and others and accepted the terms of his enemies. But not without bitterness, especially at the future prohibition of Russian naval forces in the Black Sea. His advisors, however, told him that Austria and perhaps even Prussia and Sweden might join the war against Russia. They emphasized the strength of the British navy and its ability to strike at Russia's coasts almost at will. They mentioned the difficulties of keeping so many troops (almost two and a half million, counting irregulars, militia and the navy) under arms in preparation for attacks from various directions, and they pointed out the tremendous financial strain of the war. They did not apparently stress the large number of Russian lives already lost in the war. In fact, an accurate count was not kept. But by the time peace finally arrived, about half a million had died, many from disease.

Welcoming the Sevastopol defenders was one way for Muscovites to assuage their wounded national pride. For more than a week they hosted and toasted these men: they greeted them with bread and salt, a traditional Russian welcome, and with hats thrown in the air and military marches; they invited them into their homes and cheered them as they rode through the snow-covered streets in troikas; and they held church services honoring the defenders' dead comrades.

In March 1856, a month after the Sevastopol sailors had left Moscow, the Tsar once again journeyed there by train. With the peace treaty having just been signed, those who concerned themselves with public affairs could now concentrate on other matters. And the old governor-general of Moscow had something other than war on his mind. Recently he had heard rumors that Alexander would announce the emancipation of the serfs during the upcoming coronation ceremonies. Although he himself might not believe such talk, some of his fellow nobles in Moscow were concerned. The governor-general asked the Emperor if he would reassure the nobles that their fears were groundless.

Even when primarily concerned with the war,Alexander had slowly begun to take steps to alleviate some of the more oppressive aspects of his father's rule. In addition to easing up on censorship, he lifted some of the restrictions on travel and on the number of students permitted into the universities. His manifesto announcing the peace also seemed to indicate reform. It spoke of a desire for strengthening Russia's internal well-being, for equal justice for all her people and for developing the urge toward enlightenment and useful activity.

But for many of the intellectuals of the day, the abolition of serfdom was the most pressing issue. From Alexander Herzen in his London sanctuary to more conservative thinkers like Constantine Aksakov and Pogodin in Moscow, there was general agreement among intellectuals that serfdom had to go.

While Professor Soloviev was writing about Peter the Great, Leo Tolstoy was at his estate working on a different type of historical work, War and Peace.

In the years since the emancipation of the serfs, Tolstoy had married and by the summer of 1866 had three children, Sergei, Tatyana and Ilya. His wife was Sonia Bers, the daughter of a government physician who worked in the Kremlin. Sonia's mother, Lyubov, was only a few years older than Tolstoy himself and as a young boy he apparently had once been infatuated with her. Sonia's father had met Lyubov in the early 1840s when he had interrupted a trip to Turgenev's in order to attend to her when she fell ill. Turgenev's mother had once been his mistress, and they apparently even had an illegitimate child.

In the early and mid-1860s the large Bers family, like the Solovievs, spent their summers in Pokrovskoe, and many a morning in the summer of 1862, Leo Tolstoy walked the eight miles from his rented apartment in Moscow to the Bers' dacha. One of his rivals for the affections of Sonia was a Moscow history professor, Nil Popov, who years later would marry the oldest of the Soloviev girls, Vera.

The young Sonia had rosy cheeks, dark hair and eyes, and was inclined to be serious and introspective. Tolstoy was sixteen years older than this teenager, still had his dark beard, and feared that he was too old and ugly.

On a Saturday less than two weeks after the attempted assassination, the stoopshouldered, goateed Nicholas Nekrasov approached the fat, bulldog-faced Count Michael Muraviev and asked if he could read him a poem. The scene was the exclusive English Club along the Neva, not far from the Winter Palace.

The previous five years had been difficult ones for Nekrasov. Due to differing ideologies and Nekrasov's contradictory personality, he had lost a number of old friends including Turgenev. Herzen was not the only one who came to think of him a hypocrite and swindler. How could he be a radical and sympathizer with the poor and at the same time ride in his carriage to the English Club and eat gourmet meals and gamble with the ministers and advisers of the Tsar? The fact that he was usually successful at cards and relieved such individuals as Alexander Abaza, a future Minister of Finance, of enormous sums of money did not seem to mitigate his guilt in the eyes of his critics.

Avdotya Panaeva was also no longer in his life. Perhaps she had hoped that after her husband's death in 1862,Nekrasov would marry her. Perhaps she grew tired of his sexual encounters with other women and his gambling. At any rate, she had moved out of the apartment they shared on the Liteiny Prospect. And two years after the death of her husband, she married someone else.

On that May day in 1880 that Dostoevsky left Staraya Russa for the Pushkin celebration in Moscow, the Empress Maria died, finally succumbing to tuberculosis. Her death had been the reason for the delay in beginning the Pushkin festivities. The nation had been in official mourning.

When his wife died, alone in her oxygen-supplied bedroom in the Winter Palace, Alexander was with Katia and their children at Tsarskoe Selo. Since September 1878, when she was born, there had been a new member of the family, the couple's infant daughter, named Katia after her mother. On hearing the news of Maria's death, the Tsar immediately took the short train ride into the city. Days of mourning and requiem services followed.

After the Empress's body had lain in the Winter Palace for a few days, it was transferred to the cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress. It was a gloomy Monday, rainy, windy, almost stormy in the morning when the procession wound its way over the Neva to the fortress. On horseback and in military uniform, Alexander rode behind the body of his wife. Foreign dignitaries, family and others followed behind. After a few days of lying in state, the body of the Empress was finally buried in the fortress cathedral.

One of the foreign princes at the funeral was the Empress's nephew, Alexander of Battenburg. The previous year, the Russians had helped to put him on the Bulgarian throne, but only as a limited constitutional monarch.

While Alexander II encouraged the nobles to discuss the emancipation of the serfs and Tolstoy and Turgenev signed a petition in favor of it, and while Dostoevsky, Bakunin and Muraviev were all still in Siberia and Peter Perovsky in China, the aristocratic socialist Alexander Herzen edited The Bell from his London home. Smuggled into Russia, it rivaled Nekrasov's The Contemporary in popularity and influence. Herzen himself became a first class celebrity, and for about half a decade his successive London homes became beacons attracting progressive Russians traveling in Europe.

But when he first arrived in the bustling, noisy metropolis of London in the late summer of 1852, he was a sad and disillusioned man of forty. Within the previous year death had taken his mother, two sons and his wife, still leaving him the father of three young children. In addition to his personal misfortunes, the failures of the European revolutions of 1848–9 had left him depressed about the social and political future of Europe. How events had changed since the Herzen family had set out with such high hopes for Paris in 1847! Only the recovery from Russia of his considerable fortune, aided by the Parisian banker James Rothschild, prevented his lot from being worse.

Herzen spent much time in his early years in London among the various émigrés and political exiles. Rejecting many of the values of English capitalist society, he participated in and tried to strengthen the radical subculture which surrounded him.