4 - Subaltern Careering

Summary

The archives offer us glimpses into the lives of Indian indentured labourers in Mauritius and Fiji, but there is much more the archives can tell us by contesting the spatiality of indenture and empire. This chapter introduces the concept of trans-colonial mobility. It challenges the notion that inter-colonial networks during the indenture period were reserved for colonial elites and administrative middlemen and that they were the only people to move between sugar colonies. A new subaltern geography is proposed, radically altering the perception of Indian indenture. One crucial aspect has been neglected from historicist literature on Indian indenture: the relationships formed between different colonial spaces. This has been observed by Allen who has written of ‘an attendant failure to view the indentured experience in individual colonies in larger global and comparative contexts’. The indentured archipelago concept allows for a wider geographical reading of Indian indenture, avoiding the compartmentalisation of the indenture experience.

The colonies that used Indian indentured labour are well documented, some more so than others. The mobility of labourers from India to these colonies is therefore unquestioned. Labourers travelled from India to the Caribbean, Indian and Pacific Oceans. This much is known, well-written about and illustrates the trans-oceanic mobility of labourers. It is, however, a simplistic, one-dimensional view.

The neglect of geography in the study of Indian indenture, in particular the neglect of onward geographies, has given rise to a lack of attention placed on trans-colonial phenomena which played out across the indentured archipelago and beyond. This can be traced at both the individual and trans-colonial scale. Firstly, the individual level is examined. Between 1876 and 1912, at least 18,000 Indian indentured labourers were re-migrants. Re-migrants were individuals who, having completed one tenure of indenture in a colony, elected to re-migrate either to another or, having returned to India, back to the same one for a new indenture contract. The agency of these labourers and the networks which were co-opted by them is consequently explored. Secondly, the chapter looks at the trans-colonial level, examining innovation in a time of labour shortage and the proposed migration routes which would have taken Indian indentured labourers between and to new colonies.