Kala Pani Crossings Revisiting 19th Century Migrations from India’s Perspective

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.

Introduction: Kala Pani Crossings: India in Conversation PART I: Shifting the Gaze 1. Theorizing the Troubled Black Waters 2. Moving Beyond the Memory Question: Narratives of South Asian Indenture, Global Memory Capitalism and Its Discontents 3. Connected Literatures and Histories across Kala pani: Perspectives from India 4. Escaped or Tricked? Why Indian Women Crossed 5. The ‘Terror’ of Kala pani: A Colonial Myth? PART II: Across the Oceans 6. Caste Travelling across the Kala Pani: the Case of the Unborn V. S. Naipaul 7. The Cult of Draupadi and its Propagation through Indentured Labour in Reunion Island 8. ‘I Will Survive on A Seer of Saag the Full Year’: Uncovering Women’s Work, Belonging and ‘Kala Pani’ in ‘Bidesia’ Songs 9. A Passage to Mauritius: The Ebb and Flow of Kala Pani in Hindustani Cinema 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 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 12. Exilic Trajectories of Crossing the Kala Pani: Locating Female Subjectivity in the Writings of Ramabai Espinet and Gaiutra Bahadur 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 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

Ashutosh Bhardwaj is an independent writer, journalist, and literary critic. He has worked with the leading daily The Indian Express and has been a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (2017–2019). Besides, he has received several awards and fellowships for his work as a journalist and critic.

He has three books to his credit: a short story collection (Jo Frame Men Na The, 2010), a book of essays on literature (Pitra-Vadh, 2019), and a novelistic account of the Maoist insurgency in Bastar (The Death Script, 2020), which was shortlisted for Tata Lit Fest and awarded the Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2020 at Bangalore Lit Fest. He has also published numerous articles and reviews and has presented academic papers in several national and international seminars.

Judith Misrahi-Barak is Associate Professor at University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France, where she teaches English and Postcolonial literatures. A member of EMMA, she has published numerous articles and book chapters. Her areas of specialisation are Anglophone Caribbean, Indo- and Sino-Caribbean literatures, diaspora, and migrant writing.

She is General editor of the series PoCoPages (Collection ‘Horizons anglophones’, University Press of the Mediterranean, Montpellier). Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean is the most recent volume (2020), http://www.pulm.fr/index.php/collections/horizons-anglophones/pocopages.html.

She was Co-Investigator on the AHRC Research Network series on ‘Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature’ (2014–2016). She is also Co-Investigator on the AHRC Follow-on Funding for Impact and Engagement on ‘On Stage and on Page: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts’ (2020–21) https://dalitliterature.wordpress.com.

She has co-edited Dalit Literatures in India,with Joshil K. Abraham (Routledge 2016; 2nd edition 2018), and Dalit Text