3 - Managing “Partnerships”: Domesticity and Entrepreneurial Endeavors

Summary

As we passed by one of the Indian coolie lines I had another shock, for I saw a young Tamil woman tied by her long hair to one of the uprights of their house and being beaten with a stout cane, while she uttered the most blood-curdling yells and moans as each cut of the cane made its great weal on her soft skin. Sick and appalled at the sight, I made haste to set about the man using the cane, but my friend grabbed me and held me back, assuring me that it was the custom amongst the Tamils and all Orientals to beat their womenfolk when they had done wrong, and that any interference on my part would be resented by both the man and his wife and would be likely to cause great trouble.

—Leopold Ainsworth, British planter in British Malaya (1933)

It is with these lines that the author Leopold Ainsworth, a European planter in British Malaya in the 1930s, described his first impressions of Indian coolies and their intimate relations on the estate of which he had recently become the manager. In the process, he also creates a generalized and yet vivid impression of the everyday intimacies of coolie couples for his readers. Such records were not unique to British Malaya. Colonial plantations across the British Empire, which employed Indian immigrant coolies, have dutifully recorded cases of spousal or domestic violence occurring in coolie lines—whether in planters’ memoirs, local criminal records, or even in parliamentary discussions concerning coolies. For instance, in 1902, following a rise in violent “domestic” incidents amongst coolies on plantations in Fiji, the local Immigration Department was moved by the Colonial Office in Britain to investigate the quality of social life for the indentured laborers in Fiji. W. E. Russell, one of the Immigration Inspectors, argued, apparently based on his findings, that each congregation of Indian coolies in Fiji was “a veritable hotbed of murder.” Similarly, a Colonial Office Commission sent to British Guiana in 1871 to study the condition of Indian laborers there asserted that Indian men killed their partners at a rate “142 times greater than in India's provinces.”