Of Cyber-Nationalism & Tea Parties: New & Old Diasporas Of South–South Asia

By Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake –OCTOBER 23, 2017

Dr. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake

Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in the translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained. …

[W]e will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.

~ Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands

You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names…

~ Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

2017 is a year of anniversaries in South Asia: 70 years of Indian independence; 100th year of the abolition of indentured labour, and 150 years of Ceylon tea celebrated by the Sri Lanka Tea Board with the release of a silver coin and tea parties.

Viewed as a ‘new system of slavery’ that followed the official abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1838, indentured labour migration was in turn abolished 100 years ago in 1917. By the time of its abolition, nearly 3.5 million people from the Indian subcontinent had been, more or less, legally ‘trafficked’ (to use contemporary United Nations lingo) across the Indian Ocean and the globe, albeit after many had signed an ‘Agreement’ (whence the term Girmitiya derives), to perform contract labour for three to five years in plantations owned and operated by the British Raj.[1] Whether in neighbouring Ceylon, Malaya, or further afield in Fiji, Africa or the Americas, from Jamaica, to Trinidad and Tobago in the ‘West Indies’, to Surinam, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Mauritius, first-generation ‘coolies’—the colonial-era name given to bonded labour migrants and folks recruited under the kangani system—had little fore knowledge of the slave-like conditions in which they would be transported, live and labour in distant lands.[2] Nor did they have many choices; many were fleeing endemic famine, given the changing political economy of British India.

Indentured migrants from India and their descendants—who worked lucrative sugar, rubber, cotton, coffee, cocoa and tea plantations in the tropics of the world—‘played an essential role in the development of global capitalism’, as Amrith (2013) has noted. Yet, the oral history and literary record of generations of Indian indentured diasporic communities echo narratives of social suffering and the struggle for agency against victimhood among people trapped in the colonial plantation economy. Their literature and songs describe loss and longing for an increasingly ‘imaginary homeland’, similar to those portrayed in the writings of African–American descendants of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, familiar in the literary worlds of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.[3] In academic writing and ethnography, indentured migration from India has been viewed mainly as a process of cynical exploitation of passive labour under colonialism, while migrants and their descendants were seen as victims who had little control over the decision to cross the kala pani (the taboo of the sea that stripped the elite of their caste status), and the outcomes of their migration.[4] At the same time, the south Indian or Dravidian labour diaspora that includes Tamil, Telugu, Malayalee and Kanada migrants has been marginal in studies of the Indian Diaspora with a few notable and recent exceptions. Until recently, diasporic descendants of south Indian indentured labour were largely ignored by the Indian state, even as it reached out to Silicon Valley NRIs (Non-Resident Indians). Remarkably, it was only in May 2017 that an Indian prime minister chose to visit and acknowledge the Hill County descendants of south Indian indentured labour in Sri Lanka.

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