Book review: Neilesh Bose,ed,South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labor,Law,and Global Lives

This book attempts to situate a richly textured analysis of specific systems, pathways and individual experiences of migration spiralling out of South Asia within a global history framework. Bose’s introduction champions the necessity of mapping the inevitable entanglement and co-constitution of global and local/regional histories. Bose argues that the focus on South Asia can be particularly illuminating for such a project, given the significance of indentured labour migration in the making of the modern world. The essays in this collection are organised into three thematic sections, which discuss indenture and its afterlives, legal regimes governing migration and historical biography, respectively.

In the first section, essays by Vahed and Wright introduce new perspectives on the abolition of indenture and its legacy. Vahed focuses on the role played by Henry Polak—a Jewish lawyer and close associate of Gandhi—in advocating for the end of indenture in moderate and middle-class political circles in India. The essay convincingly demonstrates how the end of indenture in Natal ultimately served different interests of divergent groups, namely moderate Indian nationalists and white settlers in Natal. Yet, by focusing on Polak, Vahed ultimately loses the opportunity to read the abolition of indenture as a moment of imbrication of nationalist history, imperial place-making and global labour histories. Wright’s essay, in contrast, is particularly effective in illustrating how imperial legacies and post-imperial economies can intersect to exert control over migrant labourers. She demonstrates how the dominance of South Asian labour in the Gulf oil fields, instead of being a natural manifestation of global wage differentials, is historically produced. Unionised Khaliji labour was replaced by a more docile and disposable South Asian labour force using bureaucratic regimes of emigration originally created to extract and manage indentured labour flows. While Wright illustrates how oppressive labour practices are enabled by ‘free’ or consensual contracts, Kumar’s essay focuses on the detailed legal and bureaucratic apparatus for recruiting indentured labourers to the sugar colonies to make the opposite claim. He argues that the ‘consent’ promised in the indentured contract had substantive implications, allowing indentured labourers some freedom to negotiate the conditions of work (e.g., the diet provided onboard ships) as well as the freedom to break a contract, albeit at the cost of a short period of imprisonment.

The second section deals with the constructive role played by legal regimes in defining borders while continuing the focus on indenture and its legacies. While Koya explores how successive legislation redefined the border between land and sea for South Asian migrants, leading to fragmentation and ‘multiplication’ of labour, Marina Martin explores how legal bordering fractured the aspirational common category of British citizens along class, geographic and racial lines to create the ‘Asiatic’ migrant. In both cases, the law was mobilised to serve changing imperial politics. Koya reframes the entire system of indenture as the micromanagement of labourers seeking to exit the South Asian marine borders, born of an imperial balancing act of abolishing trans-Atlantic slavery while permitting domestic slavery in India. This provocative reframing, where the border between land and sea emerges as the primary site for generating consent, is somewhat compromised by the relative neglect of migrants circulating in the Bay of Bengal who stood outside the legal frameworks of indenture. Similarly, Martin’s rich narrative of the construction of Asiatics in South Africa does not really engage with theories of colonial knowledge production or critical histories of racialisation, which suggest that all racialised identities are ultimately products of power. In each of these essays, the tension between imperial and global frames of analysis is particularly evident, albeit left unresolved.

The final section of the book focuses on the historical biographies of three disparate South Asian migrants. It explores how individual lives intersect with and are informed by a range of global and transnational histories, such as diasporic anti-colonialism, decolonial projects of national development and subaltern negotiations of the legacies of indenture. The essays on Taraknath Das and Pandurang Khankoje shift the focus from indentured labourers to educated and politically aware men. For Bose, the significance of Taraknath’s life history lies not only in illuminating the contributions of a lesser-known leader of the Ghadar Movement but also in its stark illustration of how transnational networks of anti-imperialism and imperial surveillance can appear within and mould the contours of individual lives. Kent-Carrasco’s essay on Khankoje presents a truly unique life trajectory of multiple displacements and unexpected connections. His nationalist activities, first in India and then as a member of the Ghadar Party in the USA, forced Khankoje to move from India to the USA and from the USA to Europe to escape imperial surveillance. Yet the ties forged through diasporic nationalism enabled him to become a naturalised citizen of Mexico and a key contributor to its nationalist project of scientific agricultural development. Govinden’s essay, in contrast, presents a feminist celebration of the apparently mundane life of Senthamani Govinder, a woman of ‘indentured stock’ whose life history is one of resilience and community-building in the face of multiple dislocations.

Taken together, this edited volume is successful in illuminating and exploring some unexpected and sparsely explored connections in the field of global migration. The essays by Vahed, Wright and Koya are particularly significant in generating new insights into the global legacies of indenture, while Kent-Carrasco’s contribution truly lives up to the promise of mapping ‘wayward lives’. However, with six of the eight essays dealing directly or indirectly with various aspects of indentured labour and its legacies, this collection risks reducing the complex histories of South Asian migrations to a global history of indenture. In this sense, the promise of Bose’s introduction is not followed through in the content.