Indian Nationalists and the End of Indentured Emigration (original) (raw)

Sirdars as Intermediaries in Nineteenth-century Indian Ocean Indentured Labour Migration

The sirdar (also termed sardar and jobber in Indian historiography)—foreman, recruiter, at once a labour leader and an important intermediary figure for the employers of labour both in India and in the sugar colonies—is reassessed in this article. Tithankar Roy's thoughtful 2007 article looked at how the sirdars' multiple roles represent an incorporation of traditional authority in a modern setting, giving rise to certain contradictions. In 2010 Samita Sen, conversely, developed Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's argument about the use of labour intermediaries in colonial India to reveal how, in the case of the Assam tea plantations, the nexus between contractors and sirdars belies the 'benign' role often accorded to the intermediary within narratives from the tea industry. This article provides examples from the overseas labour destinations in the Indian Ocean region, particularly Mauritius, to further develop and nuance the debate, through an assessment of the complexity of sirdari roles in the colonial Indian labour diaspora.

South Asian History and Culture Forcing the archive: involuntary migrants 'of Ceylon' in the Indian Ocean World of the 18–19th centuries

This article examines some marginal stories of subaltern individuals shipped and trans-shipped between the Dutch and British colonial territories of Ceylon, Mauritius and the Cape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After addressing the difficulties in retrieving traces of their lives and the ambiguities of categories of classification, the article offers insights into everyday cultural ties forged among diverse groups and looks into acts of resistance of individuals 'of Ceylon'. The experience of Ceylonese or individuals described as 'of Ceylon' not only gives insights into the various forms of mobility that shaped the making of societies in the Indian Ocean world, it also helps us capture the remarkable capacity of some of these involuntary migrants to forge fragile communities, preserve practices of meaning and resist the predations of slave owners. The snapshots we offer of people 'of Ceylon' can refine our understanding of the way imperial designs affected the lives of dominated people across territories in the Indian Ocean. They also make more explicit the link between the global and the local and how larger processes such as slavery are broken down and lived at the local level.

Sardars, Kanganies and Maistries: Intermediaries in the Indian Labour Diaspora During the Colonial Period

The History of Labor Intermediation: Institutions and Individual Ways of Finding Employment in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Edited by Sigrid Wadauer, Thomas Buchner, and Alexander Mejstrik

Just as the comprador in colonial times had acted as the local pivot in Asia for trade with the centre of the world economy, so the jobber [labour recruiter] functioned as a link between the capitalist employer and the world of indigenous labour.

Blurring boundaries, claiming space: A social history of Indians in South Africa, 1860-1915

2014

This dissertation scrutinizes the history of Indian colonial migrants in South Africa between 1860 and 1915 to analyze the politics of belonging, social exclusion, and diasporic consciousness through a detailed analysis of archival sources and secondary material. As Indians moved from one part of the British Empire to another as labor migrants and for the purposes of trade, they experienced conditions of racial discrimination which were similar to those in British India, yet differently structured on account of a distinctive set of colonial laws, modalities of rule and socioeconomic circumstances. This led to the development of a set of survival strategies, on the part of Indians both indentured and middle class, that incorporated the combined approach of accommodation and resistance while interacting with the colonial state and its machinery of control. I argue that in their struggle for legitimacy, Indians claimed the status of imperial citizens, thus drawing on their standing as British subjects in India to claim political and social entitlements in South Africa. This blurs the boundary between the citizen and the subject and I contend that it is through their claim to rights as imperial citizens that Indians trouble the ideology and discourse of citizenship and provide empirical evidence of the transactional and mobile nature of this category. This dissertation is also an analysis of a new form of resistance politics-Gandhian satyagraha that was non-violent in nature, based on the belief in the right to iii acts of civil disobedience as imperial citizen/subjects, and involved the mass participation of Indian migrants who were divided by class, gender and religion. This history allows me to argue that 'the Indian community' did not exist a priori and had to be produced in order to be effective in resistance. I highlight the contingent, fluid nature of the category of community and argue that for colonial Indian migrants, community only existed in heightened moments of communal anxiety, which culminated in mass action, and dissipated with the end of the crisis. At a macro level, this dissertation is an exploration of the geopolitical relationship between the metropole and the colonies and as such, contributes to the sociology of empire, labor migration, diasporic studies and the sociology of citizenship.

Charu Gupta, 'Innocent' Victims/'Guilty' Migrants: Hindi Public Sphere, Caste and Indentured Women in Colonial North India, Modern Asian Studies, 49, 5, September 2015: 1345-77.

Modern Asian Studies, 2015

This article analyses representations of the indentured woman in the Hindi printpublic sphere of colonial north India in the early twentieth century. There have been sophisticated studies on the condition of Indian women in the plantation colonies of the British Empire, this article focuses instead on the vernacular world within India, showing how the transnational movements of these women emigrants led to animated discussions, in which they came to be constructed as both innocent victims and guilty migrants, insiders and outsiders. The ways in which these mobile women came to be represented reveal significant intersections between nation, gender, caste, sexuality, and morality. It also demonstrates how middle-class Indian women attempted to establish bonds of diasporic sisterhood with low-caste indentured women, bonds that were also deeply hierarchical. In addition, the article attempts to grasp the subjective experiences of Dalit migrant, and potentially migrant, women themselves, and illustrates their ambivalences of identity in particularly gendered ways.