Indenture Post Mortem: Diasporic Afterlives
book manuscript in progress
Death occupies a central place in the archive of indenture. Mortality rates on ships and plantations, inquests commissioned to examine mysterious deaths, significant accidents, mistakes, murders and suicides all comprise the vernacular of indenture’s textual archive. It is a language of governance. It is the grammar of economic accountability and profitability in transport and plantation economies. And it is through this language that the events of the labourers’ lives are staged in the archive. The code is apparent as one opens the ledgers—and it reveals that the most significant measures of the labourers’ lives, in the colonial ledgers, are the ways they died.
Indenture Post Mortem advances a set of theoretical reflections that scholars of indenture should consider when excavating, interpreting, imagining and narrativising historical material on the indenture period, specifically and colonial systems of labour and servitude more broadly. In the process of advancing these theoretical considerations, the book provides a critical historical account of the British colonial system of indentureship that transported South Asians from India to the Caribbean and elsewhere in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on migration between 1845 and 1917 from Calcutta, India to Kingston, Jamaica, the book interrogates, through practice, three principal approaches to engaging with the history of colonial laws and policies on indenture—critical legal history, literary analysis, and critical reflection on colonial frameworks of analysis that remain embedded in contemporary institutions.
Research for this volume included visits to the Jamaican National Archives, the State Archives of West Bengal, the Port Authority of Kolkata, the UK National Archives and the Colonial Legal Archives of the Institute of Advanced Legal Study, University of London. It also involved extensive research of administrative registry records, including those of my own family. This research was supported by the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (now: Legal History and Legal Theory) in Frankfurt, within the ‘Common Law Transfers’ research stream.
Related Work
A tranche of related research, an interdisciplinary, narrative-based archival project called “Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive," is currently being funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Over the last decade, I have been involved in social scientific and archival research on the indentureship period, as well research on the literature of the period. I have also published creative writing on the period in a volume written by descendants of the indentureship period, called We Mark Your Memory, edited by Tina Ramnarine, Maria Kaladeen and David Dabydeen, and in a Special Issue of Gasher Magazine on new writing from the Asian diapora. In 2020, I was appointed the Kleh Visiting Professor in International Law at Boston University, where I delivered the annual lecture entitled “Contractual Intimacies: British Colonial Indenture from Kolkata to Kingston”. I’ve also delivered keynotes on invited lectures on indentureship for Stanford University, the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and for the International Academic Forum (Tokyo).