Indian Migration And Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (original) (raw)

Radhika Mongia. Indian Migration And Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2018. Marx famously chastised philosophers for their infatuation with 'interpreting the world,' while neglecting the need for its change. Is an act of "interpreting" bereft of revolutionary potential? Doesn't recasting the reality in newer and brighter light sometimes bear transformative potential? Radhika Mongia, a sociologist at York University, Toronto, Canada, persuasively demonstrates this metamorphic possibility by rereading Indian migration to South Africa in the early 20 th century. She retrieves this otherwise richly researched historical event from a not-so-distant past and turns it into a vibrant explanation of the fading of an imperial state into a nation-state. The fact that catches Mongia's sharp vision is the antecedents and consequents of the migration of the Indian indentured labor to South Africa before and after the country's unification. While she duly brings out the plight of the forced migrants, her critical attention remains trained on what the migrants and their migration entailed, and how they altered world history. In doing so she constructs a rearview mirror of history to draw events of yesteryear into sharp focus in contemporary life. Mongia's incisive hindsight upturns events and their subterranean motives to illuminate the whys and wherefores of Indian migration and how it transmuted into even bigger historical events. Her analysis of colonial Indian migration from British Empire traces a shift from a world dominated by empire-states into a world dominated by nation-states. She draws upon her expertise in historical sociology to explain the configuration and reconfiguration of power relations and their triggering impact on a train of events that could have not been foreseen. Mongia thus carves out an explanatory pathway that few historians dare take, let alone tread. For her, history and its subjects are not shards of fatalism, as historians generally tend to perceive or present; they are rather events that pulsate with life and burn with lifelike energy to create and recreate the world. She craftily infuses history of Indian migration with her imaginative, interpretative energy that births the meaning of the world around us. She approaches her subject (of Indian migration to South Africa) with a meticulous and methodical examination of a protracted trajectory that sets the stage for the forced movement of the indentured labor from one British colony to the others scattered across continents. In Mongia's account, the end of slavery and slave labor on far-off colonial plantations triggered the need for their replacement. Since 1834, when slavery in British colonies was abolished, 1.3 million Indian indentured laborers were brought in to fill the void. Between 1834 and 1917, the Indian indentured labor was sent to twenty countries across the four continents. Their well-known destinations included Mauritius, Reunion,