16 - New and Old Diasporas of South South Asia: Sri Lanka and Cyber-Nationalism in Malaysia

Summary

Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in the translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.…

[W]e will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.

—Salman Rushdie

Introduced following the official abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1833, Indian indentured labour migration in turn came largely to an end by the end of First World War. By the time of its abolition, millions from the Indian subcontinent had shipped across the Indian Ocean and around the globe. Many were ‘free migrants’, or so-called passenger Indians, but others had signed an agreement to perform contract labour as indentured workers for three to five years in colonial plantations, on railways or roads, or in construction work. Whether in neighbouring Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) and Malaya (present-day Malaysia) or further afield in Fiji, Africa or the Americas, from Jamaica to Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, to Surinam in South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Mauritius, first-generation ‘coolies’ – the name given to bonded labour migrants and those recruited under the kangani system (where free migrants were recruited by Indian intermediaries) – courageously journeyed for the larger part of a century, first by sail and then by steamship, to live and labour in far-off lands.

Indentured and free labour migrants from India and their descendants, who worked in the lucrative sugar, rubber, cotton, coffee, cocoa and tea plantations in the tropics of the world, played an essential role in the development of the modern world and the functioning of global capitalism, as Crispin Bates, Adam Mckeown and Sunil Amrith have noted. Yet the oral history and literary record of generations of Indian indentured diasporic communities echo narratives of social suffering. They describe the struggle for agency against victimhood within the colonial plantation economies. Their literature and songs detail loss and longing for an increasingly ‘imaginary homeland’, similar to those portrayed in the writings of African American descendants of the transatlantic slave trade.