Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I Agency and Resistance
- 1 Negotiating Power in Colonial Natal: Indentured Migrants in Natal, 1860–1911
- 2 Stewed Plums, Baked Porridge and Flavoured Tea: Poisoning by Indian Domestic Servants in Colonial Natal
- 3 Labour Resistance in Indenture Plantations in the Assam Valley
- 4 A Forgotten Narrative of the Satyagraha Campaign: The Treatment of Prisoners between 1907 and 1914
- 5 Toilers across the Seas: Racial Discrimination and Political Assertion among Sikhs in Canada
- II Remigration
- 6 The Remigration of Hindostanis from Surinam to India, 1878–1921
- 7 Not So Anchored: The Remigration of Indians within the Caribbean Region
- 8 On the Move: Remigration in the Indian Ocean, 1850–1906
- III Gender and Family
- 9 Intimate Lives on Rubber Plantations: The Textures of Indian Coolie Relations in British Malaya
- 10 Labouring under the Law: Exploring the Agency of Indian Women under Indenture in Colonial Natal, 1860–1911
- 11 Gujarati ‘Passenger Indians’ in the Eastern Cape since 1900: Business, Mobility, Caste and Community
- 12 The Eurasian Female Workforce and Imperial Britain: Harnessing Domestic Labour by People of Mixed Racial Descent
- IV Legacies
- 13 After the Long March: Colonial-Era ‘Relief’ for Burma Indian Evacuees in Visakhapatnam District, 1942–1948
- 14 Opposing the Group Areas Act and Resisting Forced Displacement in Durban, South Africa
- 15 Indo-Fijians: From Agency to Abjection
- 16 New and Old Diasporas of South South Asia: Sri Lanka and Cyber-Nationalism in Malaysia
- About the Contributors
- Index
1 - Negotiating Power in Colonial Natal: Indentured Migrants in Natal, 1860–1911
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 December 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I Agency and Resistance
- 1 Negotiating Power in Colonial Natal: Indentured Migrants in Natal, 1860–1911
- 2 Stewed Plums, Baked Porridge and Flavoured Tea: Poisoning by Indian Domestic Servants in Colonial Natal
- 3 Labour Resistance in Indenture Plantations in the Assam Valley
- 4 A Forgotten Narrative of the Satyagraha Campaign: The Treatment of Prisoners between 1907 and 1914
- 5 Toilers across the Seas: Racial Discrimination and Political Assertion among Sikhs in Canada
- II Remigration
- 6 The Remigration of Hindostanis from Surinam to India, 1878–1921
- 7 Not So Anchored: The Remigration of Indians within the Caribbean Region
- 8 On the Move: Remigration in the Indian Ocean, 1850–1906
- III Gender and Family
- 9 Intimate Lives on Rubber Plantations: The Textures of Indian Coolie Relations in British Malaya
- 10 Labouring under the Law: Exploring the Agency of Indian Women under Indenture in Colonial Natal, 1860–1911
- 11 Gujarati ‘Passenger Indians’ in the Eastern Cape since 1900: Business, Mobility, Caste and Community
- 12 The Eurasian Female Workforce and Imperial Britain: Harnessing Domestic Labour by People of Mixed Racial Descent
- IV Legacies
- 13 After the Long March: Colonial-Era ‘Relief’ for Burma Indian Evacuees in Visakhapatnam District, 1942–1948
- 14 Opposing the Group Areas Act and Resisting Forced Displacement in Durban, South Africa
- 15 Indo-Fijians: From Agency to Abjection
- 16 New and Old Diasporas of South South Asia: Sri Lanka and Cyber-Nationalism in Malaysia
- About the Contributors
- Index
Summary
The Power of a Man is his present means to obtain some future apparent Good.
—Thomas HobbesWhere there is power, there is resistance and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.
—Michel FoucaultMen make history, but they do not make it just as they please.
—Karl MarxThe British colony of Natal imported just over 152,000 indentured migrants between 1860 and 1911 to work on its railways, municipalities, coal mines and sugar plantations. The indigenous Zulu population had access to land at mission stations at reserves and through private companies, and resisted absorption into the racist capitalist economy for as long as they could. Therefore, despite the large indigenous Zulu population, white settlers turned to Indian labour. The indentured migrated for a variety of reasons. These ran the gamut from demographic and economic dislocation resulting from British colonialism to being a widow or outcast or perhaps simply possessing a desire to travel. Notwithstanding claims of duping and false representation, the many examples of return migration, (re)migration to different colonies and chain migration suggest that at least some of the indentured were consciously undertaking the journey and had a reasonable idea of what they were getting into.
Colonial societies and their plantations specifically were structured around power. Hobbes is cited in the epigraph because of his emphasis on the centrality of absolute power in human relations, while Marx’s domination–repression conception of power sees power as residing in the bourgeoisie and a process of constant struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The concept of power is highly contested in the social sciences. Broadly speaking, however, there is a difference between those who see power as an ‘exercise of power-over’ and those who define it as a ‘power-to-do’. Max Weber, for example, defines power as ‘the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance’. Foucault has a similar perspective: ‘if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others’. The power-to-do conception, as Hanna Pitkin explains, means that ‘power is a something’ – anything – which makes or renders somebody able to do, capable of doing something. Power is capacity, potential, ability or wherewithal.
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- Beyond IndentureAgency and Resistance in the Colonial South Asian Diaspora, pp. 19 - 37Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024