The Books of Exodus
Globalisation was once a tragic story of forced displacement and loss.
Newly arrived labourers from India in Trinidad.
A fresh wavelet of diasporic literature is upon us. Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman, released a couple of months ago, tells the story of Indian women shipped out of Calcutta, often on false pretences, to work on sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean — a dirty little secret wrapped up in the dodgy innovation of indentured labour which has just begun to unravel, a century after the event. The third volume of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy should be nearing completion. And in the interim, Sunil S Amrith has gone local in Crossing the Bay of Bengal to remind us of the millions of Indians from generations ago, gentlemen and lascars, who were far more globalised than us, in whose world Trincomalee, Penang and Rangoon were no more remote than Kanpur and Calcutta.
As the first modern transnational, the East India Company made the diaspora possible and enjoyed a moodily ambivalent relationship with it. The focus on the three Rs — reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic — in Macaulay’s scheme of education had raised cadres of standardised clerks, managers and administrators, who could be plugged in anywhere in the Empire and start playing right away. For Indian elites, this was the beginning of a phase of globalisation and in the early 20th century, it was not at all unusual for Indians to have served or traded in Burmese or Malay cities.
But below the poverty line, globalisation was a tragic story of forced displacement and loss. Having diversified into military and administrative capabilities in order to dominate markets and hinterlands, the East India Company found that land revenue no longer returned sufficient profits. Cash crops for export, like opium, offered indecent margins. But in forcing rural communities to turn away from subsistence agriculture to cash crops, the Company opened the door to famine. And so were born large populations of landless people who were willing to go to the ends of the earth — even to Bahadur’s Guyana — to escape the economic uncertainties and social problems that followed.
Indentured labour was a windfall for Western entrepreneurs, shoring up economies which had invested heavily in slavery and lost their deposit on its abolition. The system had to end for purely economic reasons, apart from emerging moral discomforts. Modern slavery was highly inefficient, being dependent on permanently demoralised workers without a past, present or future. In one period, Indian sugar entering the UK was subjected to countervailing duties to protect Caribbean plantations. Embarrassingly, the free peasant of Uttar Pradesh was producing sugar cheaper than the slave-owner of Jamaica, exposing the lie at the heart of slavery — that almost free human energy would assure competitiveness.
Did the indenture system provide a a soft landing for slavery when it crashed in flames? At least, it may have been a transitional step towards the industrial age when, for the first time in history, energy ceased to mean muscle power, whether of human or animal origin. The differential in power between employers and workers in the world that Bahadur describes is not unlike that between owners and slaves. Besides, she writes of workers who signed up for the Caribbean believing that they would be home for vacations, and of terms of employment which made return improbable, even after the term of indenture was completed. Asymmteric information flows made for a one-way ticket not wholly unlike slavery.
The literature of the early diaspora, from events like the transportation of Amitav Ghosh’s Raja Neel Rattan Halder to the accounts of indenture that are emerging from migration studies, has barely begun to be told in English. Interestingly, though, the figure of the “Girmitiya” or indentured worker — a corruption of the dodgy “agreement” that they signed — is quite well known in Hindi literature. But the academic narratives of transportation, exile and indenture are overwhelmingly outnumbered by media success stories of recent migration. In our imagination, the diaspora has lost the negative connotations of centuries past, when it was associated with the coercions of geopolitics. To our generation, the images that the diaspora conjures up are those of the charmed technologist, the hardy corner store veteran turned motelier, the committed BJP supporter of independent means.
Amazingly, though, these figures have almost never populated the pages of South Asian fiction. Even non-fiction – other than a small number of Silicon Valley books — rarely speaks of the diaspora stars that the media loves to fete. Academia writes mostly of people like Judith M Brown’s Global South Asians (Cambridge University Press), which had established a benchmark in migration studies in 2007 without mentioning Lakhubhai Pathak or Sundara Pichai even once. It appears that we, the readers, prefer ordinary lives like that of Brick Lane. n
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