Table Of ContentFragments of Empire
CRITICAL HISTORIES
David Ludden, Series Editor
A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
Fragments of Empire
Capital, Slavery, and Indian
Indentured Labor Migration
in the British Caribbean
Madhavi ICale
PENN
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright 0 1998 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Published by
Universin of Pennsyh~aniaP ress
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kale, Madhavi
Fragments of empire : capital, slavery, and Indan indentured labor migration to the
British Caribbean / Madhavi Kale
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical records and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-3467-1(alk. paper)
I. Indentured semants-Caribbean Area-History, z. Indentured servants-Inda-
History. 3. Labor supply-Caribbean Area-History. 4. Slave labor-Caribbean Area-
History. 5. India-emigration and immigration-History. I. Title.
98.27820
CIP
Contents
Introduction: Casting Empire
I. Very Particularly Situated
z. Capitalists in the Neighborhood
3. Just a Minute
4. Where Are These Records?
5. The "Saints" Come Marching In
6. Projecting Identities
7.C asting Labor in the Imperial Mold
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
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Introduction
Casting Empire
Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabu-
lary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of
Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, uni-
versities, political dogma, the diction of institutions.
-Derek Walcott, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory
BETWEEN18 37, WHEN THE FIRST indentured migrants from India landed
in British Guiana and were despatched to a handful of sugar plantations
in the colony, and 1917, when the state-supervised system of indentured
migration was suspended by the InQan and imperial governments, ap-
proximately 430,000 men and women from India migrated under inden-
ture to the British Caribbean, where they worked as laborers, primarily on
sugar plantations. Less well known outside the Caribbean, and much less
extensive than the massive forced migration that brought several million
enslaved Africans to the same shores, Indian indentured migration has had
an enormous impact on the region's economies, populations, and cultures.
When Derek Walcott accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in De-
cember 1992, he began by recalling the Trinidadian village of Felicity,
where he had once seen a festival performance of the Ramleela, "the epic
dramatization of the Hindu epic the Ramayana." Implicitly acknowledging
that he opened with this image in order to disturb those that he presumed
manv in his Stockholm audience had of the Caribbean, its history and cul-
ture, Walcott went on to reflect on the impoverishing complicities that
separated him and others in the Caribbean from the village children who
performed the epic roles of warriors, princes, and gods. "They believed in
what they were playing, in the sacredness of the text, the valiQty of India,"
he said,
2 Introduction
while I, out of the writer's habit, searched for some sense of elegy, of loss, even of
degenerative mimicry in the happy faces of the boy-warriors or the heraldic pro-
files of the village princes. I was polluting the afternoon with doubt and with the
patronage of admiration. I misread the event through a visual echo of History-
the cane fields, indenture, the evocation of vanished armies, temples, and trumpet-
ing elephants-when all around me there was quite the opposite: elation, delight
in the boys' screams, in the sweets-stalls, in more and more costumed characters
appearing; a delight of conviction, not loss.'
Walcott's speech went on to reject the authority of this History: the weight
and volume of travelers' comparisons and critics' judgments that have cast
Caribbean/colonial pasts, peoples, and their multiple memories and per-
formances as inadequate rehearsals, ill-assembled fragments and echoes of
epic tales properly played on other, distant stages. However, while he was
rejecting its authority to name him and the Antilles, Walcott reminded
his audience that History had nonetheless marked the Caribbean with its
progress through time and across continents. "It is there in Antillean geog-
raphy, in the vegetation itself. The sea sighs with the drowned from the
Middle Passage, the butchery of its aborigines, Carib and Aruac and Taino,
bleeds in the scarlet of the immortelle, and even the actions of surf on sand
cannot erase the African memory, or the lances of cane as a green prison
where indentured Asians, the ancestors of Felicity, are still serving time."
Walcott's speech draws out the perplexing, even anguishing tensions
animating his view of the Antilles, a view disciplined by History but
also captivated, disconcerted, and chastened by the festivity and antici-
pation witnessed in the celebration and performance of an ancient epic.
Slipping from prosaic, material images associated with historical dpnam-
ics that brought to Felicity the Ramleela and its celebrants (cane fields,
indenture), to lush, heroic, romantic ones associated with India of time-
out-of-memory, to, finally, those communicating the happy chaos of the
annual reenactment he had witnessed, Walcott suggests that the dsciplined
apprehensions and gaze he brought to Felicity are inadequate and impov-
erishing to an understanding not only of those particulars but also of the
Antilles generally. This uneasy habitation of History's disciplinary frarne-
work and characterization of its effects resonate with other challenges to
the field's claims to magisterial authority.
Historians and cultural critics have long argued that historical prac-
tices are forged and authorized in historically-contingent relations and
conditions; that these disciplinary practices are inadequate to the tasks of
recovery and recuperation assigned to History; and that the very profusion
Casting Empire 3
of disciplinary production-in the form of data and primary sources and
archives, but also in the accoutrements of the field's professionalization
(journals, associations, accreditation protocols, and so on) -attests to the
inadequacy of the disciplinary project itselfe2B uilding on these and related
insights, Frafiments of Empire highlights both the unruliness and prolif-
eration of debates on this imperial reallocation policy and the unevenly-
successful disciplinary efforts made by contemporaries and hstorians alike
to contain and manage this messiness.
Knowledge about "populations" and "conditions" generated and au-
thorized over centuries of British imperial expansion and colonial admin-
istration in the Caribbean and South Asia and mobilized in the specific
context of debates about Indian indentured migration in the middle de-
cades of the nineteenth century have structured not only the collection
and organization of data on which historical analyses of these populations
and conditions and their interactions are based, but also the very questions
with which historians frame our disciplinary effort^.^ Fra~mentsof Empire
traces how, in ths fragment of the epic story of world-historic capital that
was generated, circulated, deployed, and authorized by imperatives of im-
perial government and further monumentalized by hstorical practice, the
role of labor was cast for an imperial audience and stage.
Cultural, literary, and postcolonial critics and historians have pointed
out the inadequacy of "little England" approaches to and imaginings of
Britain and British historv and demonstrated the significance of both em-
pire and its elision for constitutions of British identities and national nar-
rative~T.~h e point has also been made, more or less explicitly, by those
historians who have interrogated colonial accounts of colonial pasts and
not only demonstrated the complicity of historical practice and colonial-
ism, but also developed critical approaches to both.5 Fra~mentsof Empire
argues that empire imbued the production not only of Jane Austen, Char-
lotte Brontf; and the late nineteenth-century music hall,' but also of the
supposedly untainted, foundational categories of analysis deployed when
we attempt to uncover or recover the past, pasts, history. It examines how
the category of labor was constituted at a particular juncture in capital-
ist and imperial expansion (when chattel slavery was abolished in Britain's
plantation colonies) and naturalized in the courses of imperial adminis-
tration, criticism, and chronicling of Indian indentured migration to the
post-emancipation British Caribbean colonies. Extending the insights and
challenges posed by postcolonial criticism to the category of labor and to
its place in British history, this book suggests that both were forged in
4 Introduction
the crucible of empire. By extension, Fradments of Empire suggests that to
the extent that empire is absented from its analytical frameworks, the ap-
proaches and scholarship associated with the "new" Social History of the
1960s and 1970s has been doing the epistemological work of empire, reFro-
ducing and reifying contingent meanings and values of "labor" coined and
deployed in the middle decades of the nineteenth ~enturyE.~m pire, I ar-
gue, has been the invisible pretext for the constitution of labor both as an
analytical category and, in historiography most particularly, as an identity.
Historians of empire have tried to synthesize varied literatures on
class, sexuality and race, but have often fallen back on the social historical
formulation that empire emerged out of the conflict between the process
of ''embo~rge~i~emeanntd~ i't s discontents? Attentive to cultural effects
of and resonances in the process of imperial expansion, and detailing the
multiplicity and varied agency of European colonizers, these histories of
colonial encounters and tensions still continue to assume a singular, linear
logic of European expansion and colonial consolidati~nM.~a~ki ng history
from colonial archives and their partialities, they do not adequately in-
terrogate the reductiveness of that homogenizing (or exoticizing) and hier-
archical alterity ascribed to "the colonizedn-whose "subversions" of and
"resistances" to colonial projects, anxiously traced in and recuperated from
the colonial archive, seem ever doomed to inadequacy and failure-or the
cohesiveness and integrity of imperialism." That colonial administrators
and their disciplinary technologies crucially shaped and ordered the often
contradictory and dsorderly strategies, projects, and visions of empire
they encountered and sought to manage, is muted.12 The extent to which
these disciplinary technologies are then both privileged as archive and "dis-
appeared" as process by modern historical practice is also inadequately ac-
knowledged, shelves full of criticism and theory notwithstanding. Despite
"inclusionary" gestures toward postcolonial criticism of the historical, lit-
erary, and anthropological projects, this historiography in effect reaffirms
modern history as the biography of European cultural, military and politi-
cal ascendancy. Conceding the imperial genealogies of the discipline as well
as the impossibility of transcending its protocols from withn academic
hstorical practice, this study highlights some of the many fragments-
sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary, but never always con-
sistent or uncontested-from which this epic history is assembled.13
I use "empire" in this book not merely with a specific institutional
or geographical referent in mind, but also to indcate a habit of mind: an
awareness or consciousness of resources and constraints that, while not
