‘Innocent’ Victims/‘Guilty’ Migrants: Hindi public sphere, caste and indentured women in colonial North India

Abstract

This article analyses representations of the indentured woman in the Hindi print-public sphere of colonial north India in the early twentieth century. There have been sophisticated studies on the condition of Indian women in the plantation colonies of the British Empire, this article focuses instead on the vernacular world within India, showing how the transnational movements of these women emigrants led to animated discussions, in which they came to be constructed as both innocent victims and guilty migrants, insiders and outsiders. The ways in which these mobile women came to be represented reveal significant intersections between nation, gender, caste, sexuality, and morality. It also demonstrates how middle-class Indian women attempted to establish bonds of diasporic sisterhood with low-caste indentured women, bonds that were also deeply hierarchical. In addition, the article attempts to grasp the subjective experiences of Dalit migrant, and potentially migrant, women themselves, and illustrates their ambivalences of identity in particularly gendered ways.

Public Administration During the Indenture System

“…None of the existing studies have explored the public administration system that existed during the indenture system in Fiji. Gupta (2015) highlighted that the term "girimit" points to the erosion of the caste system and shows the impact of forced migration on indentured workers. Pande (2010) argued that the indentured system represented the evils of slave trading, thus making the victims of the indenture system also the victims of racial discrimination and racism.…”

“…Since the girmitiyas were human beings, which, according to Maslow had human needs (Schmerhorn et al 2013). The fact that they were pushed out of India and worked in sugarcane fields against their will and without any family relations made them fill the gap through intermarriage among themselves, which Gupta (2015) argued as the process of depleting the "caste system" in order to fulfill their social needs on the sense of belonging (Schmerhorn et al 2013).…”

Premonitions of the Past

“…22 For a discussion of some of the popular oral genres produced by the anti-indenture movement, see Kumar (2013Kumar ( , 2015 and Vatuk (1964); see also Majumder (2010). For the role of Hindi print culture in abolition, see Gupta (2015), Nijhawan (2014), and Sinha (2014). 23 For discussion of Sanadhya's book, see Sinha (2014).…”