Description

After the abolition of slavery, indentured labourers from India were sent to plantation colonies around the world, in of the largest displacements of people across the globe in history that eventually created the ‘old’ Indian diaspora in the Caribbean, Mauritius, Fiji and South Africa. The system of ‘coolie export’ through the colonial port of Calcutta is crucial to understanding imperialist capitalism, with massive networks of state-aided recruiters kidnapping, coercing and misinforming people about life overseas, and bringing ‘coolies’ to Calcutta to be shipped to the planters who had placed orders for them. My paper looks at some of the fascinating and startling narratives, gleaned from archival research, of the ‘harvesting’ of Indian labour for the Empire’s plantations. However, the archives also confirm what Amitav Ghosh depicts in the Sea of Poppies; that the labourer was not trapped in eternal victimhood, but exercised agency, and had a ‘voice’ that can be excavated from the palimpsests of transnational history. The paper examines the narratives of these subaltern figures, including Indigenous people, that ‘speak in fragments’, in an attempt to recover the histories of trauma and resistance that mark the cultural memory of many in the old South Asian diaspora.

Dr. Nilanjana Deb teaches postcolonial literatures in the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India. Her research and teaching interests also include diaspora and migration studies, translation studies, Indigenous and subaltern literatures. She was a British Academy South Asia Visiting Fellow to King’s College, London in 2009, and is currently Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute Faculty Research Fellow at the University of Toronto. She was awarded the Australia-India Council Fellowship for 2004 to present her work at the University of Queensland, Curtin University, Monash University and LaTrobe University. She was a Shastri Doctoral Research Fellow for 2004 at the University of Toronto. She has helped research the literary histories of the Anishnaabe peoples of North America, and the Nyoongar community of South-West Australia. She is currently working on a project, ‘Mapping the Indian Diaspora in the Asia-Pacific Region,’ using archival material to develop an account of labour emigration and traffic in commodities and culture through the colonial port city of Kolkata from 1837-1927.