Kala Pani Revisited: Indian Labour Migrants and the Sea Voyage

British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2013

South Asian History and Culture, 2018

This paper article examines some marginal stories of subaltern individuals shipped and transshipped between the Dutch and British colonial territories of Ceylon, Mauritius and the Cape in the 18th and 19th centuries. After addressing the difficulties in retrieving traces of their lives and the ambiguities of categories of classification, theis 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.

Turning Tides: Caribbean Intersections in the Americas and Beyond, Ian Randle Publishers, Kingston, Jamaica, 2018

Indo-Caribbean literature has been gaining momentum over the past thirty years, creating a body of literature that most often bypasses the traditional vertical and national power relations between the former colonizing centre and the former colonized periphery. One can think of such writers as Cyril and David Dabydeen, Mahadai Das, Ramabai Espinet, Peter Kempadoo, Arnold Itwaru, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Shani Mootoo, VS Naipaul, Raj Kumari Singh, Ryhaan Shah, Jan Shinebourne, among others, and more recently Gaiutra Bahadur. These writers have written a variety of fiction and non-fiction narratives (poems, novels, short stories, essays) that foreground the odysseys, tribulations and ordeals of the people who crossed the kala pani (black waters) in the 19th century. In this chapter I would like to focus on two narratives written by descendants of these indentured labourers: Ramabai Espinet’s novel The Swinging Bridge (2003) brings out the life of her great-grandmother Gainder who voyaged from Calcutta to Trinidad in 1879, and Gaiutra Bahadur’s essay Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013) researches Sujaria’s journey from Calcutta to British Guiana in 1903. Taking a transnational and ‘transcolonial’ perspective is the only possible approach when dealing with Caribbean intersections in the Americas and beyond, in the transatlantic and indoceanic worlds. I will use what Shih and Lionnet in Minor Transnationalism (2005) call "transcolonial" relations, which denote "the shared, though differentiated experience of colonialism and neocolonialism (by the same colonizer or by different colonizers), a site of trauma, constituting the shadowy side of the transnational" (11). Bringing together The Swinging Bridge and Coolie Woman will enable a better understanding of the complex network of geographical and historical intersections, as well as generational and generic crossings. These narratives of two women writers who retrace the steps of their ancestors intersect in many subtle and varied ways. Not least because, in Cyril Dabydeen’s words in a review about Coolie Woman, they both endeavour to "foster awareness" of their history. The translations Gainder and Sujaria performed from their native India to their adopted Trinidad and British Guiana find unsettling and complex echoes in the translations that are reconstructed and reimagined by Ramabai and Gaiutra from Canada and the USA. Listening to such echoes is indispensable in the present world.

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.

New Routes for Diapora Studies, 2012

Indian writers have been making a significant contribution to world literature since independence. The past few years have seen a massive flourishing of Indian fiction in the global market. However, there is a great deal of Indian writers with few themes that usually link them together. The issues of identity and language, the themes of exile and diaspora have become the themes of prime concern of the Indian fiction. The Immigrants’ experience, the question of identity and the expatriate experience continue to furnish remarkable material for fiction. Keywords: Indo-anglian, diaspora, identity crisis, alieanation, immigration, nostalgia for

Banerjee, Rita (ed.): Cultural Histories of India: Subaltern Spaces, Peripheral Genres, and Alternate Historiography. London/ New York: Routledge. , 2020

The widely known allegory of Kala Pani gained particular traction in the first decades of the 20th Century when narratives and reports about the incarceration of bourgeois-nationalist revolutionaries in the British penal colony on Andaman Islands reached wider audiences. Kala Pani assumed a prominent position in postcolonial nationalist discourse when hegemonic forms of memorialization transformed the Andamans into an emblematic icon of anti-colonial resistance. Declaring them as major location of the freedom struggle caused an ideological “landscaping” of the islands as a nationalist pilgrimage location. This process had long-lasting effects on local negotiations of place, locality, and belonging; among others, it produced manifold elisions and silenced the subaltern histories of generations of islanders, largely of convicts and their descendants who have started to produce their own social histories. Taking up the problematic of how to write India, the chapter centers on the impact of dominant historiography on collective modes of Self-definition and belonging. It critically discusses the dynamic interplay between the hegemonic narrative of the Andaman society as integral part of the ‘imagined community’ of the Indian nation and attempts to resist epistemically by provincializing and localizing the history of the Andamans.

The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature, 2025

Circulatory Objects, Migratory Subjects, and the Limits of Form in Indian Ocean Fiction The Indian Ocean is a world of movement and circulation. Its system of monsoon winds that reverse their direction twice a year has long enabled ships to sail vast distances connecting Eastern Africa to Southeast Asia. Commodities and people, ideologies and empires, religions and languages have traversed these waters, long before European commercial activities in the late sixteenth century connected the region to global networks of trade. As Marcus Vink has argued, the Indian Ocean allows us to foreground de-territorialized "process geographies" that emphasize "action, interaction, and motion" through which "regions can be conceptualized as both dynamic and interconnected" (52). The Indian Ocean, therefore, not only offers a unique vantage point for rethinking literary and cultural imaginaries beyond static territorial models based on nation-states or area studies, but also provides a method for pursuing "transnationalisms within the Global South" without centering the region's relationship to Europe (Hofmeyr, "The Complicating Sea" 589). It complicates post/ colonial binaries while also confronting asymmetrical power structures within the Global South (Desai; Mwangi and Steiner). Geopolitical shifts in the region-the ebb and flow of empires, for instance, and the changing powers of local polities-have continued to shape patterns and channels of migration for Asian and African communities living in proximity to the ocean. Most notably, the introverted politics of postcolonial nation-states in the wake of decolonization restricted transoceanic migration, reifying territorial borders during the latter half of the twentieth century (Bose; Prestholdt). However, economic liberalization across the region after the end of the Cold War created conditions for what Jeremy Prestholdt calls "basin consciousness" in the region. Basin consciousness refers to the mounting interest, among nation-states, social groups, and individuals, in resurrecting historical linkages in the Indian Ocean basin as a basis for imagining new social identities and relations on multiple scales (452). Contemporary writings from the region are part of this resurgent basin consciousness. They evince an increasing desire to revisit the interconnected past as a way to unsettle the ethnically exclusive, territorial model of national belonging by turning to the oceanic space of connectivity, migration, and exchange. 2 While the earlier generation of postcolonial writers were concerned with the trials and tribulations of the nation-state in the aftermath of European colonialism, post-1989 writing is increasingly attuned to Indian Ocean linkages of the past and how they

Creating an archive today, 2005

The population movements that have occurred within present-day Kerala should be seen in tandem with the history of the massive out-migration record of the state, which has earned for its people the image of being a robust community with a proclivity for migration. This article explores the fashioning of the figure of the kutiyettakkaran, a migrant, in the Malayalee unconscious by problematising the peasant migration from Travancore to Malabar during 1920–70. Reading across Malayalam literary representations, this article looks at the configuration of the migrant self as located within the problematic of capital and colonial modernity. These literary texts, simultaneously fashioned by and fashioning history, give a nuanced picture of the contradictions and compulsions that governed the migrants as well as the natives. The migrant identity of the Syrian Christian settler in Malabar is construed within a social imaginary regulated by a specific discourse of development. The fashioning and circulation of a modernising and heroic image endowed the migrant with a peculiar authority in the landscape and history of Malabar. However, such a mission is critiqued, often in absolute terms, by texts closer to our times. These contemporary texts, informed as much by the consequences of the migration, play an important role in reconfiguring the Syrian Christian migrant as a stooge of capital. Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this article was presented at the Cultural Studies Workshop on ‘Citizenship and Identities’, organised by CSSS Calcutta at Goa during February 2003. Apart from the discussions at the workshop, Udaya Kumar, Janaki Nair and M. Madhava Prasad offered detailed comments that were very useful. Dilip Menon, K.S.S. Seshan and Anindita Mukhopadhyay extended, as always, insightful suggestions. Scaria Zacharia and Sasheej Hegde prodded me with their thoughtful remarks. J. Devika provided some essential references, while C.P. Biju promptly responded to my requests for books and articles. M.T. Ansari’s interventions made the text more readable and sharp in its arguments. Inputs from Asma Rasheed, K.C. Bindu and Suma Scaria were indeed helpful. I also thank the anonymous referees of IESHR for their constructive comments.