Description
When used in India, the term Kala pani refers to the cellular jail in Port Blair, where the British colonisers sent a select category of freedom fighters. In the diaspora it refers to the transoceanic migration of indentured labour from India to plantation colonies across the globe from the mid-19th century onwards.
This volume discusses the legacies of indenture in the Caribbean, Reunion, Mauritius, and Fiji, and how they still imbue our present. More importantly, it draws attention to India and raises new questions: doesn’t one need, at some stage, to wonder why this forgotten chapter of Indian history needs to be retrieved? How is it that this history is better known outside India than in India itself? What are the advantages of shining a torch onto a history that was made invisible? Why have the tribulations of the old diaspora been swept under the carpet at a time when the successes of the new diaspora have been foregrounded? What do we stand to gain from resurrecting these histories in the early 21st century and from shifting our perspectives?
A key volume on Indian diaspora, modern history, indentured labour, and the legacy of indentureship, this co-edited collection of essays examines these questions largely through the frame of important works of literature and cinema, folk songs, and oral tales, making it an artistic enquiry of the past and of the present. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of world history, especially labour history, literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, diaspora studies, sociology and social anthropology, Indian Ocean studies, and South Asian studies.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Kala Pani Crossings: India in Conversation
Ashutosh Bhardwaj and Judith Misrahi-Barak
PART I: Shifting the Gaze
1. Theorizing the Troubled Black Waters
Vijay Mishra
2. Moving Beyond the Memory Question: Narratives of South Asian Indenture, Global Memory Capitalism and Its Discontents
Nandini Dhar
3. Connected Literatures and Histories across Kala pani: Perspectives from India
Ritu Tyagi
4. Escaped or Tricked? Why Indian Women Crossed
Kanchan Dhar
5. The ‘Terror’ of Kala pani: A Colonial Myth?
Suparna Sengupta
PART II: Across the Oceans
6. Caste Travelling across the Kala Pani: the Case of the Unborn V. S. Naipaul
Joshil K. Abraham
7. The Cult of Draupadi and its Propagation through Indentured Labour in Reunion Island
Vijaya Rao
8. ‘I Will Survive on A Seer of Saag the Full Year’: Uncovering Women’s Work, Belonging and ‘Kala Pani’ in ‘Bidesia’ Songs
Ridhima Tewari
9. A Passage to Mauritius: The Ebb and Flow of Kala Pani in Hindustani Cinema
Kumari Issur
PART III: Re-imagining the Kala Pani Narrative
10. Coolie Life-Writing and its Shifting Locations - Narrativizing Kala Pani within the Nation and in the Diaspora
Kusum Aggarwal
11. Pioneers across Kala Pani: Reading Girmitiyas in Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge, Gaiutra Bahadur's Coolie Woman and Totaram Sanadya's Twenty-One Years in the Fiji Islands
Himadri Lahiri
12. Exilic Trajectories of Crossing the Kala Pani: Locating Female Subjectivity in the Writings of Ramabai Espinet and Gaiutra Bahadur
Praveen Mirdha
13. Retrieving the History of Coolie Women: Historiography, Research and the Role of Agencies in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge and Peggy Mohan’s Jahajin
Arnab Kumar Sinha
14. The Politics of Representation and the Interface of Sycorax and the Snake Woman: A Study of Olive Senior’s Arrival of the Snake-Woman
Udita Banerjee
