Panel abstract EASAS conference

Convenor: Dr. Harald Fischer-Tiné, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften, Seminar für Geschichte Südasiens, Germany
Co-convenor: Dr. Friedhelm Hartwig, Centre of Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin, Germany

Panel Abstract: This panel will focus on various marginal groups in the maritime world of colonial South and South-East Asia such as pirates, vagrants, ‘pauper pilgrims’, prostitutes, Anglo-Indian ‘half-castes’, convicts, soldiers, ‘distressed seamen’ and indentured labourers. Most of them either passed through the bridgeheads of the colonial empires – the port cities – or they constituted a specific and permanent stratum of these cities’ inhabitants. With few exceptions, these groups are characterised by move-ment and mobility. Some of them travelled constantly, as in the case of seamen, others left their village for the first time to undertake a pilgrimage. They created problems for and they came into conflict with both the privileged European and non-European elites and even with other ‘subaltern’ layers of the population. Frequently, their movements and activities were regarded as causing disorder and hence as a danger to society by the authorities they were confronted with. Sometimes their mere existence provoked debates about moral values, social hierarchies, the boundaries of race and class or the need for new legislation. However, opinions about them by the ‘respectable’ portions of society were by no means fixed. They largely depended on contextual factors.
The panel invites scholars from various disciplines to join their efforts and uncover the dynamic, spontaneous modes and agencies of these groups hitherto neglected by research, the structure of their often tragic “Lebenswelt”, as well as to analyse elite discourses and strategies to control or come to terms with them. The fate of the groups in question is closely intertwined with the transition of social, economical, political and geographical boundaries under the double impact of colo-nialism and modernization. The panel, therefore, hopes to contribute to a better understanding of these processes. In this context, developments in transport and com-munication and changing strategies of employment at the end of the 19th century are crucial aspects to explore. Socio-cultural transitions like the emergence of social stereotypes and the creation or re-affirmation of hierarchies of race, class and gender are equally important themes reflected in some of the papers.

Papers accepted for presentation in the panel:

Paper 1 Title: “What shall we do with the drunken sailor?” —Indian convict ship mutinies in the mid-nineteenth century

Paper Abstract: This paper is part of a broader project that seeks to ‘read against the grain’ in reconstructing the experiences of convicts transported overseas to prisons and penal settlements in South and Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century. In many ways, convict ships are empty archival spaces; for whilst colonial officials recorded the departure and arrival of transportation convicts – often in meticulous detail - the experiences of the convict men and women on board are more difficult to access. I want to try and do so through an examination of the ‘spaces of disorder’ represented by convict ship mutinies. During the 1830s and 40s, there were more than half a dozen incidents in which convicts rose against their captains and made a bid for freedom. These mutinies were transgressive acts that reveal much of conditions on board ship, the alliances forged between convicts and crew, the political economy of capture and the gendering of punishment – not to mention the problems of fixing identities that I have discussed elsewhere. Mutiny narratives also reveal ‘spaces of disorder’ within the discourses of colonialism. As such, they are part of what Antoinette Burton has described as the ‘unfinished business’ of colonial modernity.

Paper Giver 2: Dr Harald Fischer-Tiné, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany

Paper 2 Title: Flotsam and Jetsam of the Empire? – European Seamen and spaces of disease and disorder in mid-nineteenth century Calcutta

Paper Abstract: European and American sailors represented a numerically significant group among the non-official ‘white’ population in colonial India. There were always several hundreds of them ‘on reserve’ in the port cities of the subcontinent. Even under normal circumstances they caused a good deal of trouble for the colonial officials owing to their notorious ‘unruliness’ and their affinities to drink and violence. In times of economic distress or natural catastrophes the number of unemployed seamen could grow significantly to several thousands, many of which had to turn to begging, crime or vagrancy to cope with the situation. They hence were perceived as a serious threat not only to public order but also to the prestige of the ‘ruling race’.
In the 1850s and 1860s the problem reached such dimensions as to call for direct Government intervention through legislation, organised charity and appointment of committees of enquiry. Focusing on the Port of Calcutta, the paper tries to reconstruct both the practical measures and discursive strategies adopted by the colonial authorities to come to terms with a group on the fringes of ‘white’ society in British India. One such discursive strategy which will be analysed in detail was a conflation of class and racial boundaries amounting to the ‘orientalization’ of ‘Sailor Jack’ as a being which was ‘beyond the pale of civilization’ and thus deserved a treatment similar to that given to the ‘native’ population.

Paper 3 Title: A ‘scandal to the English name and English Government’: European pauperism in colonial Calcutta, 1858-the 1920’s

Paper Abstract: My paper will focus on those people who were of British origin, permanently based in India, impoverished and were often (if not always) racially mixed. The colonial authorities labelled these people as the ‘domiciled class’, in contrast to the members of the privileged ‘non-domiciled’ European community. The paper covers the period between 1858 and the 1920’s, and chiefly discusses the Calcutta context. Recently scholars of British colonialism in India have started to seriously consider the political and social implications of the presence of subordinate white populations in the colonising context. They have shown how the colonial authorities regarded such groups as ‘white loafers’ or ‘white prostitutes’ as causing disorder to the class and gender boundaries on which the racial hierarchies of colonial society were predicated. The aim of this paper is to cover similar ground by drawing attention to the ambiguous attitude of Europeans towards their ‘domiciled’ brethren. It will argue, first, that the Europeans in India essentially disparaged the existence of the domiciled class despite their shared British descent, and excluded the latter from the tightly guarded sphere of their status and interests. And second, this exclusionary attitude was ambiguously supplemented by an inclusionary impulse of peculiar sort; the colonial authorities feared that the rapid pauperisation of the ‘domiciled class’ might disgrace British racial prestige in the eyes of the Indian subjects, and therefore sought to control the lives of the ‘domiciled’ through an inclusive politics of welfare and education.

Paper Giver 4: Dr Ashwini Tambe, Georgetown University, Washington D.C., USA

Paper 4 Title: Hierarchies of Subalternity: Managed Stratification in Bombay’s Brothels, 1914-1930

Paper Abstract: As Bombay grew to be a prominent seaport and industrial centre, its brothels serviced foreign sailors and migrant workers. Among the ranks of its brothel workers were women from distant parts of India as well as Europe and Japan. In this paper, I explore the state management of racial and national boundaries in Bombay’s colonial sex trade. I highlight the contrasting conditions under which Indian and European prostitutes worked in the city, and how this highly stratified racial/sexual order was policed. I describe how upper rung police officials carefully monitored European brothel workers, and contrast this with police neglect of the abuse, and even murder, of Indian brothel workers. In particular, I show how legal currents on prostitution from 1914 to 1930-- some focused on anti-trafficking, others on nationalist moral reform-- emerged and produced contradictory effects for women in the sex trade. I base my analysis on a range of police files, high court testimonies, newspaper reports, social workers' records and census tables.

Paper 5 Title: 'Subaltern networks: methodologies and sources for re-assessing the Indian labour diaspora'

Paper Abstract: There are two main areas at the heart of my research interests. The first is marginality specifically the lives of adivasis and peasants as they are affected by environmental, political and economic change in colonial central India. The second is diasporas - the understudied phenomena of labour migration within and beyond the shores of India. To a large extent the two are related: migration being transforming in its effects on community and identity or otherwise a means of escape from the very same. Relocation raises further questions about the conceptualisation of identities, which are often far from 'local' in the first instance. Subaltern networks were of considerable importance in the mobilisation of Indian labour, particularly migration overseas, but have been comparatively neglected by historians. Whilst they functioned ostensibly as a vehicle for the subordination of labour, they were often over time, and with varying degrees of success, appropriated by the subordinated, becoming both a means of socio-cultural reassertion and an economic strategy. Peeling away the labels which defined and continue to essentialise the histories of Indian workers in the British Empire, this paper will critically examine the sources and methods available for the study of how the coolie, convict or slave made his or her own world and the means they found for surviving within the interstices of the colonial system.

Paper Giver 6: Dr Katrin Bromber, Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin

Paper 6 Title: ‘Heshima’ – British War Time Propaganda to East African Troops in Ceylon (1943-45)

Paper Abstract: Between 1943 and 1945, the South East Asia Command’s pro-pa-ganda also aimed at legitimising the out-of-area employment of the 11th (East African) Division in Ceylon and Burma. Alongside radio broadcasts in Swahili and Chinyanja, classroom teaching by members of the East African Army Education Corps or films shown by mobile cinemas, ‘Heshima’ (dignity), the military Swahili newspaper published by the Department of Information in Colombo played a vital role in motivating African troops by depicting them as ‘travelling soldiers’ in ‘the’ Indian Ocean and heroes who fought within the Allied Forces.
Apart from mapping a world for them in terms of ‘warscapes’, propaganda was to a great extent directed at controlling the African soldier’s relations to, firstly, the Ceylonese population and, secondly, the Indian troops. The discursive strategies to implement this part of British war time propaganda are the focus of the paper.

Paper 7 Title: The East India Company’s ‘Abkarry’ and Pilgrim Taxes: Questions of Public Order and Morality or Revenue

Paper Abstract: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, taxes on pilgrims and taxes on spirituous liquors and intoxicating drugs were exempted from abolition orders affecting the rest of the sayer revenue [Sec. 4 Bengal Regulation XXVII 1793 and Sec. 31 Bengal Regulation XII 1805]. Both categories of tax were promoted as a means of securing public order, although there were obviously other motivations. It can certainly be argued that pilgrims and sellers and consumers of liquor and intoxicating drugs occupied ‘spaces of disorder’. But, it is also a fact that these taxes raised a very handsome revenue while committing the Company to some unwanted responsibilities and expenses. In the case of the Pilgrim Tax, the Company became identified with the affairs of Jagannath Temple, a potent symbol of Vaishnavite faith on the coast of Orissa visible from the Bay of Bengal. Paradoxically, the discourse of Company administrators, who were concerned to guarantee to their Indian subjects the ‘free exercise of their religion’, ultimately rationalized both the decision to collect the tax at Jagannath in 1806 and the decision to relinquish the tax in 1841. Of course, it can be argued that the reversal of Company policy was, in part, the result of the provocative discourse of irate Christian missionaries. The tax on spirituous liquors and intoxicating drugs was more central to the Company’s economic interests. The tax assisted the Company to develop a monopoly of the export opium trade. The fact that this export trade was conducted by enterprising smugglers all along the Chinese coast was an embarrassment to the Company. It ultimately embroiled the British state in war with the reclusive government of Imperial China. Certainly propaganda distorted Company policy in the name of public morality and public order. On the basis of archival research in the India Office Library in London and provincial archives in India, this paper aims to shed light on the motives which underlay these forms of taxation.

Paper Giver 8: Dr Kama Maclean, School of History, University of New South Wales, Australia

Paper 8 Title: Speaking to Subalterns/Subalterns Speaking: Pilgrims, Governments and the durghatna at the 1954 Kumbh Mela

Paper Abstract: In colonial and nationalist discourses about the Kumbh Mela, the term ‘pilgrim’ is loaded with meaning, connoting an innocent but superstitious and ignorant subject (never quite a citizen, even in the independent nation); the Other to the enlightened missionary, Magistrate or Minister. As subalterns, pilgrims at the Kumbh Mela are duly silent as they perform their religious quest; represented, rarely representing. Even so, pilgrims were thought to personify the quintessential, impressionable Indian peasant – for this reason, the Kumbh Mela was seen to be a site conducive to educating, uplifting and communicating with India’s masses. The colonial state used the mela for such purposes, and Indian nationalists, including Tilak, Gokhale and Nehru had each utilised the mela as a mechanism to spread their messages prior to independence.
In 1954, at what was widely lauded as the first Kumbh Mela in independent India, both central and provincial governments attempted to utilise the Kumbh as a means of communicating with the mela-going public, actively encouraging mass attendance through a number of means, including the appearances of several of India’s politicians (styled as ‘VIPs’ in the discourse of the day). When hundreds of pilgrims were killed in a stampede on the main bathing day, caused by impossible congestion and inadequate planning, the plaintive testimonies of survivors in the subsequent governmental inquiry were overlooked. Instead, it was the accounts of educated witnesses, who were held to be able to report the event more accurately, which led the inquiry to exonerate the government of any role in the tragedy (durghatna). The ultimate blame fell upon the pilgrims’ ‘fatalism’ and uncritical, obsequious reverence to the holy men believed to have catalysed the stampede. Yet despite the official inquiry’s findings, there remains today a vibrant oral discourse amongst those connected to the event about who was culpable for the 1954 Kumbh Mela durghatna.

Back to SASNET

Search the SASNET Web Index

SASNET - Swedish South Asian Studies Network/Lund University
Address: Scheelevägen 15 D, SE-223 63 Lund, Sweden
Phone: +46 46 222 73 40
Webmaster: Lars Eklund
Last updated 2006-09-11

Back to 2004 Conference page

Panel No. 22

Panel Title: Marginalized groups. On Pilgrims, Paupers, Pirates and Prostitutes. Discovering “Spaces of Disorder” in the Colonial Societies of Maritime South and South-East Asia (ca. 1700-1950)

Papers accepted for presentation in the panel: