Old Indian Diaspora

what is old Indian diaspora?people who emigrated during the colonial period of nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries as slaves, convicts, contract labourers.

The old Indian diaspora includes those who emigrated during the colonial period of nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, that is, early modern, classic capitalist period, to the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese colonies as slaves, convicts, contract labourers under the indenture system, Kangani system, and free or passage emigrants as traders, clerks, bureaucrats and professionals. The semi-voluntary flight of indentured peasants migrated to the non-metropolitan plantation colonies such as Fiji, Trinidad, Mauritius, South Africa, Malaysia, Surinam, and Guyana, roughly between the years 1830 and 1917. 

The emigration of Indians during this period was a consequence of vast colonial expansion, especially by the British Empire. Indian emigration during this period was more than any other country. But large proportion of those who emigrated eventually returned back to India. Old Indian diaspora occupy spaces in which they interact, by and large, with other colonized peoples with whom they have a complex relationship of power and privilege as in Fiji, South Africa, Malaysia, Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam.

About 1.4 million indentured Indian workers migrated to the following colonies/countries: Mauritius, British Guyana, Natal (South Africa), Trinidad, Reunion, Fiji, Guadeloupe, Kenya, Uganda Jamaica, Dutch Guiana/Suriname, Martinique, Seychelles, St. Lucia, Grenada, and St. Vincent. Tinker (1974), quoting Lord John Russel, defined indentured labour as a ‘new system of slavery’, where a signed contract to work for a given employer for five years, performing the tasks assigned to him/her. 

Under the Kangani system, during the period 1852 to 1937, 1.5 million Indians went to Ceylon, 2million to Malaya and 2.5 million to Burma. Under the third type of migration, known as ‘free’ or ‘passage’ migration, traders and artisans migrated to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Natal (South Africa), Mauritius, Burma, Malaysia, and Fiji during the colonial period. Under this type, the employees of the British government emigrated to the overseas territories in South Asia, East Africa, and South Africa. Tinker calls them ‘imperial auxiliaries’. About 10% of the Indian diaspora consisted of ‘free’ migrants.

The bulk of the labour migrants to Burma, Ceylon and Malaya and a significant number of indentured labourers to the sugar colonies were from South India (mainly from the Tamil and Telugu speaking areas). Only 6 per cent of all indentured labourers who were sent to Mauritius were from Maharashtra. French India sent labourers to the French colonies in the West Indies, Reunion and French Guiana. North India was the largest supplier of indentured labour to the colonies. Majority of the labourers before the 1870s came from the tribal and plain areas of Bihar. After the 1870s, they came from the depressed districts of the present day eastern Uttar Pradesh. In the 1830s, large number of Dhangars from Chota Nagpur plateau migrated.

The Calcutta emigration reports provide details pertaining to the religious and castes composition of the migrants. Unlike the indentured labourers who belonged to the lower castes, the ‘free’ migrants came from the upper castes. They included Banias from United Provinces, Marwaris from Rajputana, Chettiars from Madras, Pathans from North-west India and Gujaratis from Bombay presidency. 

For instance, the Shamsi merchants commenced settling along the coast of East Africa in the nineteenth century and Surat’s traders, who followed the girmityas (indentured labourers) to Fiji after 1879; and those from privileged or comprador classes who found themselves drawn to imperial London, sometimes as emissaries for nationalists, sometimes as seekers of a ‘sound’ Oxbridge education, sometimes driven simply by an implanted nostalgia. 

Although the old diaspora is made up of communities that hail from different provinces, who speak different languages and practice different religious, and who are often inspired to leave ‘home’ for quite dissimilar reasons, the category is justifiable on the grounds that the earlier or older migration happened in the context of (and was determined by) colonialism in the heyday of capitalism.

The level of economic life has increased considerably over the last few generations in the entire Indian diaspora. The present generation certainly enjoys a better life then the indentured/Kangani labourers. The level of living and socio-economic development of the community is affected by several factors like the level of the socio-economic development of the entire country and the level of modernization, ‘sons of the soil’ policy, separate quotas for different races/communities in educational institutions, government, police, army and public and private sector undertakings, equal access for all communities to all resources of the nation, socialist policy of the state leading to nationalization of business/industrial houses, takeover of huge landholdings of landlords and redistribution of landholdings to the peasants/landless, racial discrimination, racial prejudice, absence of citizenship, the initiatives taken by the community for its own development, policy of equal treatment of all communities and meritocracy, international migration of professionals and businessmen, etc.

The story of the socio-economic transformation of the old Indian diaspora in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has not been the same. At one end of the scale, we have Singapore where the Indian community enjoys a high level of socio-economic development and equal access to all resources of the state. At the other end, we have countries like Fiji, South Africa, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Myanmar where majority of Indians are below poverty line due to various factors as discussed above. The Indian communities in other countries could be placed somewhere between these two ends.

___________________________________________________________________

  

For more information, click on Diaspora, Brain Gain, Brain Drain in Indian Context, Brain Drain,  Brain Exchange, Brain Waste,  Brain Gain in Indian Context, Brain Circulation, Indian Diaspora, New Indian Diaspora

  

Reference:

• Dr Johannes G De Kruijf, Dr Ajaya Kumar Sahoo (edited), Indian Transnationalism Online: New Perspectives on Diaspora.
• Vijay Mishra, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary.
• Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, A History of Indian Literature in English.
• Ajaya Kumar Sahoo and Laxmi Narayan Kadekar (edited), Global Indian Diaspora: History, Culture and Identity. 

___________________________________________________________________

Related Questions:

Concept of Old Indian Diaspora.

A brief statistical analysis of Old Indian Diaspora.

Reasons for Old Indian Diaspora.

Aptitude Amplifier ©2017. All Rights Reserved.