CFP Kala pani Crossings #2: Diaspora and Gender across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, University of Pondicherry, 26-27 Feb, 2020 (original) (raw)

This symposium follows up on the seminar 'Kala pani Crossings: India in Conversation' that was held at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (September 23-25, 2019). Kala pani Crossings #1 had meant to throw more light on the 19 th century migrations from India to Fiji, Mauritius, the Caribbean and Africa, and to revisit the history from the perspective of India. Over one million Indians were transported between 1834 and 1917 to sugar colonies under the system of indentured labour in order to meet the demand for cheap, unskilled labour after the abolition of Atlantic slavery in 1833. Yet, it is a chapter that has been excluded from Indian history. Kala pani Crossings #2 intends to focus more precisely on the gender dimension in the migrations and in the historiography. Initially, the recruits were predominantly male with very few females. Historians such as Brij V Lal (1984) and Gillion (1962) have recorded an unequal sex ration (3.3:1 for Mauritius and 2.2: 1 for Natal) that lead to numerous problems as the indentured labourers settled in the colonies. As a result, eventually, efforts were made to enforce more recruitment of women in the ratio of around 40 women per 100 men (Tinker 1974). Women, therefore, came to constitute an important section of the migrant indentured population that was transported from India. Colonial history as well as migrant discourse, however, tend to omit references to women migrants and their experiences. Women have been homogenised within the largely androcentric master narratives of their male counterparts. It is the feminist scholarship and its specific interest in diaspora and migration studies that has excavated the feminine narrative and emphasised the fact that the gendered dimension of migrant experience cannot be overlooked or downplayed. This symposium is particularly interested in exploring the intersections of diaspora and gender within the diasporic and Indian imagination in order to investigate the ways in which race, class, caste, gender, and sexuality intersect with concepts of home, belonging, displacement and the reinvention of self. Its aim is to comprehend-if diasporic locations/positions marginalise women by alienating them from their home, or empower them as they emerge from nationalistic narrative to a transnational experience, allowing women to problematize/rethink home-host dichotomy;-the possibilities of negotiation or resistance, and how those possibilities are determined by race, class, caste, or ethnicity;