Across the Kala Pani

Across the Kala Pani
Author: Shevlyn Mottai
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2022-10-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1776380320

In 1909, four women board a ship in Madras to cross the Kala Pani, the ‘black water’, to Natal. Lutchmee, a young widow, has escaped her vengeful mother-in-law and self-immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre. Vottie, from the Brahmin caste, is an educated girl whose abusive husband tries to hold on to his caste at all costs. Chinmah, heavily pregnant when she boards the ship, is married to an older man as part of an unpaid debt. Dazzling but shy Jyothi is single. On board the ship, the women will form friendships and alliances. They will help each other through trial and trauma, even after they arrive and are separated. Like many Indians desperate to escape unbearable conditions in their home country, these women are only too eager to believe what they’ve been told: that a better life awaits them in South Africa, where caste doesn’t matter, food is plentiful, and liberty will be theirs after just five years. But the reality of life on the plantations reveals the truth about the crossing: that it is usually a one-way journey, rife with misery, and that the hardship doesn’t end after the ship has dropped anchor in Durban harbour. The epic stories of these immigrants – the brave, the bold, the kind; the weak, the cruel, the cowardly – are woven into the fabric of South Africa’s Indian population today. Shevlyn Mottai has drawn on her ancestors’ history to highlight the bonds formed between women during adversity, and to celebrate their journeys of tragedy and triumph.

Kala Pani Crossings, Gender and Diaspora

Kala Pani Crossings, Gender and Diaspora
Author: Judith Misrahi-Barak
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2023-12-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 100381610X

This volume explores the intersections of diaspora and gender within the diasporic and Indian imagination. It investigates the ways in which race, class, caste, gender, and sexuality intersect with concepts of home, belonging, displacement and the reinvention of the nation and of self. Positioning itself as a companion to Kala Pani Crossings: Revisiting 19th century Migrations from India’s Perspective (Routledge, 2021), the present book examines whether indentureship and diasporic locations marginalised women and men or empowered them; how negotiations or resistances have been determined by race, class, caste, or ethnicity; how traditional standards of Indianness and gender relations have been reshaped; how ideas of home, self and the nation have been impacted in the diaspora and in India after the 19th and early 20th century indentureship migration; and what 21st century Indians stand to gain by theorizing the legacy of 19th century indenture through a gender framework. To understand how fiction and non-fiction writers have negotiated the legacy of indentureship to create spaces where normative practices can be interrogated and challenged, the book gives pride of place to interviews with writers such as Cyril Dabydeen, Ananda Devi, Ramabai Espinet, Davina Ittoo, Brij Lal, Peggy Mohan, Shani Mootoo, and Khal Torabully. Thus rooted in critical analyses but also in subjective and creative perspectives, this volume is a major intervention in understanding Indian indenture and its legacy in the diaspora and in India. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, history, Indian Ocean studies, migration and South Asian studies.

Kala Pani Crossings

Kala Pani Crossings
Author: Ashutosh Bhardwaj
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-12-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 100051319X

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.

Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad 1917–1947

Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad 1917–1947
Author: P. Mohammed
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2002-01-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1403914168

This book is about the struggles of female and male descendants of Indian indentured migrants in Trinidad in the first half of the twentieth century, each desiring to preserve some aspects of the gender system brought from India between 1845 and 1917, which were important to their continued definition of ethnic identity and community in Trinidad. At the same time the situation of migration allows for challenges to the caste system of Hinduism and, for women and some men, new opportunities to confront the more restricting aspect of Indian patriarchy which followed them across the seas from India.

Diasporic (dis)locations

Diasporic (dis)locations
Author: Brinda J. Mehta
Publisher:
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9789766401573

Indo-Caribbean women writers are virtually invisible in the literary landscape because of cultural and social inhibitions and literary chauvinism. Until recently, the richness and particularities of the experiences of these writers in the field of literature and literary studies were compromised by stereotypical representations of the Indo-Caribbean women that were narrated from a purely masculine or an Afrocentric point of view. This book fills an important gap in an important but underestimated emergent field. The book explores how cultural traditions and female modes of opposition to patriarchal control were transplanted from India and rearticulated in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora to determine whether the idea of cultural continuity is, in fact, a postcolonial reality or a fictionalized myth. kala pani, to Trinidad and Guyana provided courage, determination, self-reliance and sexual independence to their literary granddaughters who in turn used the kala pani as the necessary language and frame of reference to position Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity with equating writing as a pubic declaration of one's identity and right to claim creative agency. The book is of critical interest to those interested in twentieth-century literary studies, Caribbean studies, gender studies, ethnic studies and cultural studies.

Coolitude

Coolitude
Author: Marina Carter
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 1843310031

A deconstruction of the stereotypical depictions of the coolie in the British Empire.

Kala Pani

Kala Pani
Author: Monica Mody
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Travelers
ISBN: 9780984029761

"Kala Pani fits the loose editorial definition of a hybrid text: it combines the intense play of poetry, language as live field ... with structures of screenplay, newsfeed and public relations statement ... as well as narrative threads and characters who keep the same names throughout the book."--Review by Kate Schapira in Pank magazine, posted online March 6, 2014.

Empire of Enchantment

Empire of Enchantment
Author: John Zubrzycki
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2018-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190934883

India's association with magicians goes back thousands of years. Conjurors and illusionists dazzled the courts of Hindu maharajas and Mughal emperors. As British dominion spread over the subcontinent, such wonder-workers became synonymous with India. Western magicians appropriated Indian attire, tricks and stage names; switching their turbans for top hats, Indian jugglers fought back and earned their grudging respect. This book tells the extraordinary story of how Indian magic descended from the realm of the gods to become part of daily ritual and popular entertainment across the globe. Recounting tales of levitating Brahmins, resurrections, prophesying monkeys and "the most famous trick never performed," Empire of Enchantment vividly charts Indian magic's epic journey from street to the stage. This heavily illustrated book tells the extraordinary, untold story of how Indian magic descended from the realm of the gods to become part of daily ritual and popular entertainment across the globe. Drawing on ancient religious texts, early travelers' accounts, colonial records, modern visual sources, and magicians' own testimony, Empire of Enchantment is a vibrant narrative of India's magical traditions, from Vedic times to the present day.

Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World

Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World
Author: Supriya Chaudhuri
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2017-09-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351620002

Commodity, culture and colonialism are intimately related and mutually constitutive. The desire for commodities drove colonial expansion at the same time that colonial expansion fuelled technological invention, created new markets for goods, displaced populations and transformed local and indigenous cultures in dramatic and often violent ways. This book analyses the transformation of local cultures in the context of global interaction in the period 1851–1914. By focusing on episodes in the social and cultural lives of commodities, it explores some of the ways in which commodities shaped the colonial cultures of global modernity. Chapters by experts in the field examine the production, circulation, display and representation of commodities in various regional and national contexts, and draw on a range of theoretical and disciplinary approaches. An integrated, coherent and urgent response to a number of key debates in postcolonial and Victorian studies, world literature and imperial history, this book will be of interest to researchers with interests in migration, commodity culture, colonial history and transnational networks of print and ideas.