The presence of Indian labour across the globe during the nineteenth century not only helped transform the capitalist global economy but also affected the cultural expression, including folklore, of migrant workers. More than 1.3 million Indians signed contracts of indentureship between 1834 and 1916 and shipped out to sugar plantations across the globe under the aegis of European empires. The first colony to bring in Indian indentured work was Mauritius in 1834. British Guyana imported indentured labour next in 1838, Trinidad and Jamaica in 1845, the smaller West Indian colonies of St Kitts, St Lucia, St Vincent and Grenada in the 1850s, Natal in 1860, Suriname in 1873 and Fiji in 1879. Most indentured Indian labourers chose to stay in their new homes after the termination of their contracts and formed a distinct Indian diaspora in their respective host countries. Indentured Indians brought many sociocultural norms and expressions to the host countries which evolved over the succeeding generations. Folklore is one of these traditions.

Folklore is the traditional expression of a society or a particular group of people in which folk tales, songs, ballads, proverbs or jokes are transmitted from one generation to another. In the course of transmission, the folklore changes, depending on the place and cultural context. This is one of the reasons that different versions of the same folk tales exist. The origin and authors of folklore usually remain hidden as the stories and traditions are carried on and spread orally among often illiterate people.

INDENTURED FOLK TALES

When indentured migrants reached plantation colonies, they not only brought Indian religio-cultural norms but also folklore. Most of the folklore of the indentured Indians is in the Bhojpuri language as the majority of migrants were from the Bhojpuri-speaking areas of north India. However, over time, exposure to the languages, places and space of the host countries meant that indentured folklore in Mauritius can be found in both Creole and Bhojpuri. Other folklore in Mauritius is recorded in south Indian languages, such as Tamil, as a significant portion of the indentured there were from south India.

There are broadly five kinds of folk tales prevalent among Indian indentured societies across the globe. These are didactic tales, social stories, religious tales, love stories and entertainment stories. Moralistic tales endeavoured to encourage certain behaviours in children (and adults). A moral education was attempted through such accounts.

On 4 November 1944, the home department of the Government of India ordered a notice to be placed in the Gazette of India announcing the enforcement of the Indian Reciprocity Act against South Africa. Because persons of Indian origin in the Union of South Africa faced restrictions in entering, residing in, and trading, the central government directed that similar restrictions be imposed on South Africans of non-Indian origin in British India. In addition, the home department distributed an office memorandum explaining that the Government of India had decided to enforce the Indian Reciprocity Act and take retaliatory measures against the union government. The memorandum declared that the decision to finally implement the Indian Reciprocity Act against the Union of South Africa was a reaction to proposed legislation, such as proposed legislation that was colloquially known as the Pegging Bill. The proposed bill, which would later be passed as the Trading and Occupation of Land (Transvaal and Natal) Restriction Act in 1943, was referred to as the ‘Pegging Act’ because it ‘pegged’ a racial pattern of land ownership in the Durban municipal area. Sir Shafa’at Ahmad Khan, the agent of the Government of India in South Africa at the time, had also recommended that the Government of India consider more drastic retaliatory measures towards the union government, advising that the bill be made immediately applicable. The floor of the legislature, Indian public opinion and the press were all insistent in demands for retaliatory measures against South Africa.

The Government of India decided to give effect to all measures of the Reciprocity Act. One of these measures was to refrain from employing any more South African nationals of non-Indian origin in the various services in India, as Indians in South Africa were not employed in any but the ‘most subordinate and menial posts’. Only approximately 200 white South Africans were employed in India. Specifically, the Home Department requested that South Africans of non-Indian origin not, in future, be appointed to posts in the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Police and other services at the provincial or federal levels. Despite putting these measures in place, the memorandum admitted that they were ‘not likely to be of any considerable magnitude’ because so far, no South African had been employed in the Secretary of States or Provincial Services and the number of those who held technical posts was negligible.

The contribution of the Indian indentured of South Africa to the colonial economy was massive. Despite undertaking back-breaking work, from labouring on sugar plantations to building railways, most of the just over 150,000 migrants chose to stay in South Africa rather than return to India. Their impact was incredible, yet their histories were largely invisible in the public domain and continue to be marginalized. The promise of a memorial for the indentured made by the government in 2010, as Indians commemorated the 150th year of the arrival of the first indentured Indians in South Africa, failed to materialize even a decade later as the 160th anniversary was being marked. There is one indentured migrant, however, Sultan Pillai Kannu, whose name was emblazoned on a technical training college, and in postapartheid South Africa, a street bears his name.

Poisoning occupies a special place in the history of crime. It requires a considerable degree of premeditation, and because it often produces very little incriminating evidence and until comparatively recently was virtually undetectable, it was an attractive and favoured method of killing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1880 and 1920, 18 high-profile cases of poisoning by Indian domestic servants in Natal were tried before the circuit, district and supreme courts. Due to the clandestine nature of poisoning, the difficulty of detection and the knowledge required for its successful execution, it is likely that this only represents a small proportion of the actual number of attempted poisonings – such is the predilection of historicity and nature of archival sources.

Under the Indian indenture system, approximately 152,184 indentureds voyaged to colonial Natal in the period between 1860 and 1911. Conventional and linear histories of these years have tended to present a static categorisation of Indians in Natal as those who toiled on the sugar plantations along the coastal belt of Natal and non-contracted traders commonly referred to as ‘passenger Indians’. For the most part, indentured Indians were considered by the state and employers to be dispensable components of a capitalist bonded labour system. On the periphery of this indenture–trader dichotomy, Indians also took up positions as railway workers, constables, court messengers, miners, fishermen, fruit and vegetable hawkers, tea pickers, teachers, interpreters and, in this case, domestic servants. The private and personal spaces of colonial society within which domestic servants lived and worked – the settler homes – bore witness to entangling relationships between master and servant that were at times both volatile and tender. This chapter focuses on the crime of ‘administering poison with intent to murder’ and argues that the very act of poisoning manifests as a mode of agency, revenge and resistance by domestic servants against their masters and mistresses. The crime of poisoning in a settler community is rather revealing of the deep levels of anxiety and paranoia that proliferated in Natal’s white community.

Caribbean migration studies have focused overwhelmingly on the forceful and semi-free movements of Africans and Asians during the period of slavery and indentureship as well as the extra-regional movement of Caribbean nationals to Europe and North America following the Second World War. These studies have done remarkably well in excavating the dynamics so associated with the aforesaid patterns of Caribbean migration, namely how migrants were uprooted from their homeland and transported across the Atlantic and Indian oceans to provide the oxygen of labour on the Caribbean plantations. Studies of migration from the Caribbean following the Second World War show how Caribbean nationals have been pushed out of the region and pulled to developed destinations. Moreover, these studies have provided the fundamental reasons for the leaving and settling of the migrants. They have revealed how the migrants have adapted, settled and even reconfigured the demographics, economics and cultures of the receiving enclaves. Howbeit, studies of migration within the Caribbean pale in comparison to the larger influx during the period of slavery and indentureship as well as out-migration following the Second World War. Still, even when studies are conducted on migration within the Caribbean, they are ethnically imbalanced, focusing largely on Africans and Hispanics. Yet when studies are conducted on Asians, the remigration of them within the Caribbean is largely absent.

The academic exclusionary treatment of Indians in the general Caribbean migration narrative is rather unfortunate since Indians have been on the move since the mid-nineteenth century from India to the Caribbean, within the Caribbean, from the Caribbean to Europe and North America and back to the Caribbean. Crispin Bates and Marina Carter ask, ‘Why did such a large number of Indian labour migrants who had completed one term of service overseas return to India, and then remigrate, or move from one colonial territory to another?’ These scholars espouse that ‘the frequency of remigration, and of onward migration to other colonies suggests considerable enterprise and strategic thinking on the part of labour migrants seeking out opportunities within the interstices and constraints of the colonial labour economy’. Until we understand how wide and complex the remigration of Indians has been, one important aspect of their migratory experience will remain a puzzle and buried in the lower depths of Caribbean migration.

Under the leadership of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Indian community staged the first non-violent mass movement in South Africa. This involved defiance of unjust laws, courting of imprisonment, boycotts, marches and strikes. In the Transvaal, then under British rule, 3,000 Indians, including more than one-third of adult males and even some children, went to prison and suffered privations between 1908 and 1911. Over a hundred were deported to Bombay and Colombo, often leaving their families behind without support. In 1913, the struggle extended beyond the Transvaal when nearly 40,000 workers, equivalent to over half of the adult Indian population of Natal, struck work. Almost 10,000 were imprisoned, some in mining compounds. Some workers were killed and many injured. Yet in the vast corpus of literature on the Satyagraha campaigns, the treatment of Indian prisoners, both men and women, has not been examined or documented fully.

Existing studies have focused mainly on the leadership of Gandhi and the socio-economic background of the Indian resistance in South Africa. Gendered aspects of the struggle have mainly been documented through a feminist lens seeking to debunk the myth of docile Indian women in the diaspora. Surendra Bhana and Neelima Shukla-Bhatt published poems written in Gujarati, English and Hindi during the movement and produced an interesting literary study of the struggle. In addition, numerous biographies of Gandhi deal with the Satyagraha campaigns, but they are focused on Gandhi, his leadership and spiritual development. However, none of the aforementioned studies has examined, in-depth, the prison conditions and treatment of satyagrahis.

Gandhi’s Collected Works and the Indian Opinion are perhaps the only first-hand insights on the prison conditions of both men and women incarcerated in Durban and Johannesburg during the Satyagraha campaigns between 1907 and 1914. This chapter documents the treatment and impact of prison conditions on satyagrahis between 1907 and 1914. For many resisters, the prison became a site of struggle; it did little to deter or diminish their resilient spirit. They became more defiant amidst the plethora of discriminatory laws and repeated imprisonment. In exploring the incarceration of Satyagraha prisoners, this chapter shifts the focus from the coloniser to the colonised, to the marginalised and subaltern groups, ‘viewing them as important historical actors in their own right’. Clare Anderson, in her study on the 1857–1858 Indian uprising, shares a similar trajectory revealing how prisons became ‘sites of Indian resistance’.

This chapter explores the portrayal of Bhojpuri indentured female migrants and their identity formation in Surinamese photographs. By examining several archival photographs, I connect visual traces to various contemporaneous cultural developments described by Tejaswini Niranjana, Roshini Kempadoo, Marina Carter, Anouk de Kooning and Patricia Mohammed. Analysing the photographs, considering the social circumstances that must have influenced identity formation, it is possible to reconstruct the social roles that were imposed on women migrants. As noted by Bhikhu Parekh, I attempt to understand the journey of these women and how they were transformed by diasporic experiences. Since Bhojpuri females belonged to villages characterized by diverse Indian traditions, how did the latter remain or change within this process leading to multiple identities? These photographs can be mined not just for their archival and historical value but also for what they aesthetically communicate and the way they have been staged. The photographs have been archived in various collections, including the National Archives, the Tropenmuseum and the Rijksmuseum collection in the Netherlands.

There is a lack of academic scholarship on female indentured labourers in archival photographs. The images selected from Suriname feature individuals from Chinese, Indian and Indonesian indentured labour communities that were shipped there and lived alongside the descendants of enslaved Africans. Women have been documented in the actual landscape of the places they lived in Suriname, becoming agents of reinvention and cultural innovation. This chapter seeks to address and discuss this, in particular the ethnic mixture and diverse cultural influences that are visually unavoidable in these images. I argue that by viewing the cultural and ethnic diversity apparent in these photos, we can analyse visual traces that may indicate the emancipation of female Bhojpuri migrants from gender norms based in the rural settings in India.

THE ARRIVAL OF BHOJPURI MIGRANTS

After the abolition of slavery by the Dutch government in 1863, indentured labourers were required in Suriname to maintain the plantation economy. Most of the recruited labourers came from the region covering the western part of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP). The present generation of diasporic Indians living in Suriname and the Netherlands have their migrant roots mostly in these Bhojpuri- and Awadhi-speaking regions.

When the first ships with Indian indentured migrants from Calcutta arrived in Suriname in 1873, only a small proportion of the inhabitants were Dutch.

The understanding of caste or casteism and resistance against it beyond South Asia remains rudimentary. Popular subfields such as South Asian studies, postcolonial studies, Indian Ocean studies and Indian diaspora studies have been woefully deficient in engaging with caste as a foundational problem in the history of the Indian subcontinent. Likewise, such disciplines have not given much-needed focus to the caste-free (and anti-caste) culture, politics, economy and history of caste-oppressed communities in the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods. This has led to a lopsided understanding of, for instance, the re-establishment of caste through colonial apparatuses and how the privileged-caste groups, such as Brahmins, re-entrenched themselves to turn the British Raj into a British–Brahmin Raj. Significantly, however, we have now begun to learn about the multiple movements and discursive and non-discursive practices of the marginalized communities who challenged the domination of self-privileging-caste groups in colonial and postcolonial India. In this chapter, I examine how immigration, emigration and transmigration were part and parcel of the repertoire of resistance of caste-oppressed Indians, taking particular examples from the experiences of Indian migrants who settled in the Caribbean.

The institutionalized structures and violent practices of race, caste and gender have always been crucial push factors of migration in the modern period. Recent philosophical and interdisciplinary studies have engaged with how aspects of race, gender and nationality intersect with migration. However, thus far, theories of migration and philosophies of immigration have inadequately engaged with the emigration of caste-oppressed communities during European colonialism in South Asia or with the postcolonial transmigration of such communities between the Global South and the Global North. The hitherto unexamined interrelationship between colonial policies and the emigration of Indians against caste, on the one hand, and the reconstruction of a caste-free life overseas by oppressed Indians, on the other, provide critical philosophical, cultural, political, economic and historical dimensions to migration.

Colonial racial capitalism depended upon comprador privilegedcaste groups for its success (and stability). A large majority of Indians were, as a result, culturally othered, spatially segregated and economically underprivileged as lower castes and untouchables through the colonial state's legitimization of precolonial privileged-caste identities and practices. The Brahmins – who constituted not even 5 per cent of India's population, then and now – reaped maximum benefits through the propagation of their castepower and by utilizing British colonial apparatuses.

For diasporic Indian communities living in Burma (present-day Myanmar), the Second World War was a period of massive upheaval. As the Japanese military bombed the colonial capital of Rangoon (present-day Yangon) in December 1941 and conquered large swaths of Burma by the spring of 1942, many Burma Indians fled across the Bay of Bengal by steamship, aircraft or on foot. They, along with much smaller numbers of Anglo-Indians, Anglo-Burmese and Europeans, reached British India’s borders, numbering approximately 500,000 in total. Upon their arrival in India, these displaced people became the subject of large-scale relief projects developed by the government, which included limited efforts to employ ‘skilled’ workers, labour projects to absorb ‘unskilled’ evacuees and the issuance of repayable loans. The final stage of colonial relief for the Burma evacuees came after 1945, when the government cobbled together a repatriation programme to assist those who wished to return to Burma after the war. By providing an overview of these policies, this chapter will track the colonial administration’s changing responses to Burma Indian populations as they went from ‘migrants’ to ‘evacuees’ to ‘repatriates’ during the 1940s. Drawing on historical evidence from Visakhapatnam district, which received the largest number of Burma Indian evacuees of any district in India during the war, the chapter also provides a brief discussion of evacuees’ responses to government-run aid programmes.

In recent years, scholars have begun to reappraise the impact of the Second World War on South Asia. One of the outcomes of this new research has been to see the war years not only as the lead-up to national independence, but also as a period that caused massive disruption and social and political change throughout Asia. Within this broader literature, a growing number of authors are now examining the effects that the war had on migratory and diasporic Asian communities. Scholarship from the 1970s onward on Indian communities in Burma, for instance, has presented the regional onset of war and the evacuation of Burma as the start of a precipitous decline for people of Indian descent. For instance, Nalini Ranjan Chakravarti, a Burma Indian Civil Service (ICS) member, wrote of the period from 1942 onwards as ‘the end of Indian interests in Burma’.

The Dutch colony of Surinam (present-day Suriname), situated on the northern tip of South America, was one of the last colonies to introduce indentured labour from India. In 1870, after extensive negotiations, the Dutch and British governments signed a 26-article treaty, agreeing to the employment of indentured Indian labourers in Surinam. This Coolie Treaty (Koelietractaat) was not implemented for another three years, and it was only on 5 June 1873 that the ship Lalla Rookh arrived in Surinam with 410 emigrants, having left the port of Calcutta (present-day Kolkata) in February. Within one year (between June 1873 and April 1874), seven ships followed, bringing almost 4,000 Indian emigrants to Surinam. In total, 34,304 Indian emigrants were received across 64 ships between 1873 and 1916. It is important to note that these Indian emigrants remained British subjects in Surinam. Their descendants did not become Dutch subjects by law until 1927, and by that point the majority had been born in the colony. They designated themselves as Hindostanis (‘Hindostanen’ in the Dutch language) in reference to their land of origin – Hindustan being one of the original names for India. Due to their status as strangers in a foreign colony, special arrangements protected them. According to Article 9 of the Coolie Treaty, the Indian labourers indentured to Surinam had the right to a free return passage after five years. It also stated:

More than a third (11,512) of the 34,304 Indian emigrants returned to British India at the expense of the Dutch government. Yet, significantly, in spite of the gratis opportunity to return, the majority of the emigrants settled permanently in Surinam. They received approximately 5 acres of fertile land free of rent for six years and 100 guilders (equivalent to the cost of the return passage). Furthermore, over a quarter (9,725) of them signed a second contract for an additional five years in Surinam and received an extra premium of 100 guilders. After settling, these Indians and their descendants became successful small farmers in due course.

The Invisibility of Eurasian Female Domestic Migrant Labourers in Britain

At the outset of this chapter, I would like to clarify that the term ‘Eurasian’ to identify ‘biracial’ people or people of mixed racial descent (Euro-Asian) was in general use throughout the Victorian Age. It was replaced by the term ‘Anglo- Indian’ in 1911, when members of the community in India made it known through their leaders that they would prefer to be labelled as such in order to distinguish them from the mixed-race offspring of colonials based in other parts of Asia and the Far East. After India’s Independence in 1947, the community was more categorically defined in Article 366(2) of the Constitution of India as the progeny of European fathers and Indian mothers domiciled in India (then British India, now among the territories of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh). The perplexing issue of their nomenclature attains significance for the simple reason that they were often erroneously classified: as ‘Europeans’ when in India and as ‘Indians’ or ‘Asiatics’ when outside the colony. Rarely were they correctly labelled as ‘Eurasians’ or ‘Anglo-Indians’ – a matter that makes it challenging to isolate them as a distinct ethnic community among Indians and has added to their invisibility. Indeed, as much as India’s people of mixed racial descent are ‘invisible’ in the South Asian diaspora as immigrants in Great Britain today, so too had they remained uncounted among labour forces in England during the decades of the British Raj. The reasons for their ‘invisibility’ (as I have argued in my book on Britain’s Anglo-Indians2) are that they had European surnames (either Portuguese, French, Dutch or British, derived from their paternity) and anglicised first names, were 100 per cent Christian by religious affiliation, were either Roman Catholic or Anglican, and employed English as their mother tongue. They were also westernised in terms of dress and lifestyle. This combination of factors served to create the identity confusion that still plagues the community but also serves to single them out in photographs when depicted in diverse groups.

Difficult as it might be to identify people of mixed racial descent from the Indian subcontinent in the United Kingdom (UK) today, it is well-nigh impossible to ascertain their presence in the UK during the colonial era.

This book concerns what has been called the ‘first wave’ of Indians who travelled overseas to work on colonial plantations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a migration facilitated and supervised by the British colonial government of India under what became the indentured labour scheme. Under this scheme, workers would sign a contract, popularly known as a girmit, or agreement, which bound them to work for a single employer at a fixed wage for a fixed period of three–five years. Indentured migrants identified themselves with specific terms such as angaze in Mauritius, kontraki in Suriname and girmitiya in Fiji. However, the British commonly called them ‘coolies’ – a term already familiar to them from its usage in South India and China.

The indenture system was introduced to overcome the crisis that emerged from the banning of slavery in the British Empire by the British Parliament in 1833. The system attracted huge criticism and opposition from the very beginning; however, it continued until 1917 when it was finally abolished, under pressure from Indian nationalists and the greater importance of moving troops and supplies during the global conflict of World War I. Another reason was the crisis in the sugar industry as the production of sugar beet undermined the demand for plantation sugar cane in global markets.

This volume explores the transformative experiences of those who migrated, and the memories of those who did not return after expiration of their contract, but chose to stay in their respective host countries. These communities of South Asians abroad struggled to adapt to their new situations, standardizing the languages spoken and preserving some cultural and folk traditions, whilst discarding others (notably many of the distinctions of caste) – in short, forging for themselves entirely new identities as ‘diasporic Indians’.

Many books and essays concerning the history of Indian indentured migration in the colonial period begin with numbers. They attempt, with overused tropes, to generalize in a few lines the experience of labour migration across multiple destinations throughout the globe and a period of more than a century. However, the numbers themselves are uncertain. Many more millions of South Asians migrated without contracts of indenture as ‘free migrants’, otherwise known as ‘passenger Indians’. And many re-indentured, or re-migrated from colony to colony, without ever returning home (what Reshaad Durgahee has termed ‘subaltern careering’) – thus evading enumeration in official statistics.

New research on the workings of the ‘web of empire’ have revealed that the British Empire was not only sustained by raw materials from India but depended significantly on its manpower working as ‘coolies’, or indentured labourers, in distant plantations in Mauritius, Fiji, West Indies, East and South Africa, and the Straits Settlements. The white dominions of Canada, Australia and the United States (US) similarly depended on low-paid labourers from the East for much of their work of opening up and colonising the prairie wastes. Initially, the bulk of migrants from India in North America came from among the strong and hard-working Sikhs of the Punjab province of India, who found it lucrative to work in these places, lured by the comparatively higher wages than they could obtain at home. However, as the market for labour became saturated by the first decade of the twentieth century, these countries began to erect legal barriers to the free entry of these Indian migrants under pressure from domestic workers, unwilling to face competition from migrants. This came as a great shock to migrant Indians, who had until then been thinking of the empire as a vast field of ‘shared opportunities’.

In 1908, Canada tried to exclude Indian migrant labour by legislation, which insisted on ‘continuous passage’ for entering into the ports of the country. This would automatically disable Sikh migrants, who had to change ships to reach Canada. Gurdit Singh’s attempt to charter a Japanese ship, Komagata Maru, in June 1914 to ensure continuous passage for the Sikh migrants to Canada was a challenge to this legal barrier against the migrants. The turning back of this ship from Vancouver shattered the belief of the migrants in an equal imperial citizenship, and it became incendiary material for the revolutionary nationalist propaganda of the Ghadr conspirators, based in San Francisco. Student radicals in Canada and America, such as Lala Har Dayal, Kartar Singh Sarabha, G. D. Kumar and Husain Rahim tried to contact radicals all over the world, in India House in the United Kingdom (UK), France, Egypt, Turkey and Switzerland, and tried to spread their message through journals, like the Ghadr and the Hindustanee from San Francisco and the Al Kasas from Egypt. They even linked their efforts with German imperialist conspirators to gain funding and guidance in their common mission against British imperialism.