South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labor, Law, and Wayward Lives

281 Pages·2020·5.027 MB·English

by  Neilesh Bose

South Asian Migrations in
Global History
ii
South Asian Migrations in
Global History
Labour, Law and Wayward Lives
Edited by Neilesh Bose
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First published in Great Britain 2021
Copyright © Neilesh Bose, 2021
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Cover design: Terry Woodley
Cover image: detail from Ghadar di Gunj (Echoes of Mutiny), a compilation
of nationalist and socialist poetry, Urdu edition, 1914. Courtesy of SAADA
South Asian American Digital Archive.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bose, Neilesh, editor.
Title: South Asian migrations in global history : labor, law, and wayward lives /
edited Neilesh Bose.
Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020032057 (print) | LCCN 2020032058 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350124677
(hardback) | ISBN 9781350197343 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350124684 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781350124691 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: South Asians–Migrations. | Foreign workers, South Asian–History. |
South Asians–Foreign countries. | South Asian diaspora. | South Asia–Emigration and
immigration–Historiography. | Globalization.
Classification: LCC DS339.4 .S668 2020 (print) | LCC DS339.4 (ebook) | DDC 304.80954–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032057
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032058
ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-2467-7
ePDF: 978-1-3501-2468-4
eBook: 978-1-3501-2469-1
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Contents
List of illustrations vii
Notes on contributors viii
Foreword Victor V. Ramraj xii
Acknowledgements xv
List of abbreviations xviii
Prologue: Archives, paper regimes and mobility
Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie 1
Introduction Neilesh Bose 7
Part I Impacts of Indentured Labour
1 Gokhale, Polak and the end of Indian indenture in South Africa,
1909–1911 Goolam Vahed 37
2 Imperial labour: Labour, security and the depoliticization of oil
production in the Arabian Peninsula Andrea Wright 63
3 Legal discourse on ‘coolies’ migration from India to the sugar colonies,
1837–1922 Ashutosh Kumar 85
Part II Law in Migration Histories
4 Slavery, abolitionism, indentured labour: The problem of exit and the
border between land and sea in colonial India Riyad Sadiq Koya 113
5 Who is Asiatic? Drawing the boundary in the legal and political
framing of Indian South Africans, 1860–1960 Marina Martin 139
Part III Historical Biography
6 Taraknath Das: A global biography Neilesh Bose 157
7 From British colonial subject to Mexican ‘Naturalizado’:
Pandurang Khankhoje’s life beyond the reach of imperial power
(1924–1954) Daniel Kent-Carrasco 179
vi Contents
8 A woman of peace and calm: The story of Senthamani
Govender Devarakshanam Betty Govinden 201
Epilogue: Ocean currents and wayward crossings Renisa Mawani 225
Select bibliography 231
Index 249
Illustrations
3.1 Original Copy of Terms of Service in Tamil for Trinidad 90
3.2 Original Copy of Terms of Service in Tamil language for Fiji 91
3.3 Original Copy of Terms of Service in Telugu language 91
3.4 A picture of an old immigrant’s ticket, PA-16, NAM 92
3.5 a) Original Copy of Terms of Service for Natal 93
3.5 b) Emigration Pass for Men for Fiji 94
3.5 c) Men’s Emigration Pass for Fiji 95
8.1 Birth certificate 202
8.2 Kandasami Sami Gounden 203
8.3 General view, Clifton Tea Estate 205
8.4 The factory with Indian barracks 205
8.5 Indians picking tea leaves 206
8.6 The factory – Clifton Tea Estate 206
8.7 Managing Director’s house 207
8.8 Information on Nallathambi’s father 211
8.9 Granny’s wedding day 212
8.10 The family – Granny with husband and children, Asothie, Savy,
Vigie and Devan 213
8.11 Granny at the centre of the family 218
8.12 Granny with Asothie, her daughter, Mags, her grand-daughter
and Verushka and Rishane, her great-granddaughter and great-
grandson 219
Contributors
Neilesh Bose is Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair
of Global and Comparative History at the University of Victoria in British
Columbia, Canada. With interests in cultural and intellectual histories,
globalization, religion, secularism and migration, he is the author of Recasting
the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University
Press, 2014) and the editor of Beyond Bollywood and Broadway: Plays from the
South Asian Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2009). Other writings include
articles in BC Studies, Modern Asian Studies and South Asia Research and review
essays in Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial
History and South Asian Review. He has edited special sections in South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies (2018, with Kris Manjapra and Iftekhar Iqbal),
History and Theory (2017), Performing Islam (2016, with Fawzia Afzal-Khan and
Jamil Khoury) and South Asian History and Culture (2014).
Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie is Senior Professor of History at the University of the
Western Cape. She is author of From Cane Fields to Freedom: A Chronicle of
Indian South Africans (Kwela Books, 2000) and Gandhi’s Prisoner? The Life of
Gandhi’s Son, Manilal (Kwela Books, 2004). Additionally, she is the editor of Sita:
Memoirs of Sita Gandhi (Durban Local History Museum, 2003) and the special
issue ‘Paper Regimes’, published in Kronos: A Journal of Southern African History
(2014). She has written extensively on immigration and surveillance histories,
land dispossession and restitution, and India-South Africa connected histories.
Currently, she is writing a manuscript titled Letters from Phoenix Settlement:
Maintaining Gandhi’s Heritage in South Africa, 1915 to 1976.
Devarakshanam Govinden is the author of the award-winning book, Sister
Outsiders: Representation of Identity and Difference in Selected Writings by South
African Indian Women (Pretoria and Leiden: UNISA Press and Koninklijke Brill
NV, 2008). She is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Journal for
the Study of Indentureship and its Legacies.
Daniel Kent-Carrasco is Research Professor in the History Division of CIDE
(Centro de Estudios y Docencia Económicas), in Mexico City. He is a Mexican
Contributors ix
historian interested in the past and present of the Third World. His work looks
at the contemporary intellectual, cultural and political history of India, South
Asia, Mexico and Latin America. He obtained his PhD from King’s College of
the University of London.
Riyad Sadiq Koya is a writer based in Santa Rosa, CA, USA  His article ‘The
Campaign for Islamic Law in Fiji: Comparison, Codification, Application’,
in Law and History Review (2014) explores debates on the application of
religious personal laws for Indian indentured labourers in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.  His research interests include labour and empire, plantation
economies, religion and law, citizenship and Pacific and Indian Ocean histories.
Ashutosh Kumar is a historian of the Global South and a fellow at New Delhi’s
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. He has held fellowships at the University
of Leeds, the New Delhi Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS),
the Centre for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University
and the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla, India. He is the author
of Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–1920
(Cambridge University Press, 2017) and with Crispin Bates and Marina Carter,
The Indian Labour Diaspora: A Resource Text for Students (Edinburgh University
Press, 2017). With Claude Markovitz, he is the co-editor of the forthcoming
edited volume titled Re-visiting the First World War: Indian Soldiers in the Global
Conflict.
Marina Martin is Researcher and Departmental Coordinator in South Asian
Legal History at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History. She is
interested in the colonial histories and legacies of exchanges and encounters
between Britain, India and South Africa, with a focus on citizenship, immigration
and membership. Her current book project explores the legal, political and
economic conditions that gave rise to the so-called ‘Indian Question’ in South
Africa during the British colonial period and beyond. Marina is also a specialist
in the modern economic, institutional and legal history of money and credit,
specifically the system and instrument known as ‘hundi’ or ‘hawala’. She received
her PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics. She has
held fellowships with the Collaborative Research Institute at Goethe University,
Frankfurt, the University of Pretoria in South Africa and LSE’s Asia Research
Centre, as well as Yale University’s MacMillan Centre for International and
Area Studies