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©2014 BIJITA MAJUMDAR ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BLURRING BOUNDARIES, CLAIMING SPACE: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF INDIANS IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1860-1915 By BIJITA MAJUMDAR A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Sociology written under the direction of Ethel C. Brooks and approved by _______________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Blurring Boundaries, Claiming Space: A Social History of Indians in South Africa, 1860-1915 By BIJITA MAJUMDAR Dissertation Director: Ethel C. Brooks This dissertation scrutinizes the history of Indian colonial migrants in South Africa between 1860 and 1915 to analyze the politics of belonging, social exclusion, and diasporic consciousness through a detailed analysis of archival sources and secondary material. As Indians moved from one part of the British Empire to another as labor migrants and for the purposes of trade, they experienced conditions of racial discrimination which were similar to those in British India, yet differently structured on account of a distinctive set of colonial laws, modalities of rule and socio-economic circumstances. This led to the development of a set of survival strategies, on the part of Indians both indentured and middle class, that incorporated the combined approach of accommodation and resistance while interacting with the colonial state and its machinery of control. I argue that in their struggle for legitimacy, Indians claimed the status of imperial citizens, thus drawing on their standing as British subjects in India to claim political and social entitlements in South Africa. This blurs the boundary between the citizen and the subject and I contend that it is through their claim to rights as imperial citizens that Indians trouble the ideology and discourse of citizenship and provide empirical evidence of the transactional and mobile nature of this category. This dissertation is also an analysis of a new form of resistance politics – Gandhian satyagraha that was non-violent in nature, based on the belief in the right to ii acts of civil disobedience as imperial citizen/subjects, and involved the mass participation of Indian migrants who were divided by class, gender and religion. This history allows me to argue that ‘the Indian community’ did not exist a priori and had to be produced in order to be effective in resistance. I highlight the contingent, fluid nature of the category of community and argue that for colonial Indian migrants, community only existed in heightened moments of communal anxiety, which culminated in mass action, and dissipated with the end of the crisis. At a macro level, this dissertation is an exploration of the geopolitical relationship between the metropole and the colonies and as such, contributes to the sociology of empire, labor migration, diasporic studies and the sociology of citizenship. iii Acknowledgments This dissertation has taken a long time to complete and I am grateful to my committee, family and friends for helping me through this journey. My chair, Ethel Brooks has been so much more than her assigned role. She has been advisor and friend and it was her constant faith in my scholarship and my potential as an academic that made the completion of this dissertation a possibility. József Böröcz has been an inspirational mentor and with his generous intellectual contributions and his friendship, he has been a huge influence on my entire graduate career and on this dissertation. Paul McLean has always supported my work while providing thoughtful critiques that improved my scholarship every time. Along with her considerable intellectual influence on my work, Ann Mische’s infectious enthusiasm in and outside the classroom was a huge source of encouragement and support. All of them have helped mould me into a better scholar. I also thank Edward Ramsamy for agreeing to be the external member on this committee and generously contributing his time and insights. The administrative staff at the Sociology department has been a huge source of support and I especially thank Dianne Yarnell, Jeannie Danner and Shan Harewood. Outside of Rutgers, I am indebted to the support I received from several scholars at other universities. I thank Gita Dharampal-Frick at the University of Heidelberg, Germany for her interest in my research. Kalpana Hiralal and Goolam Vahed at the University of Durban, Westville helped me during my research trip to Durban by offering constructive comments on my work and by generously offering personal research material. Friends have helped in sustaining and encouraging me at all times during this iv dissertation. My friendships with Manjusha Nair, Baris Mucen, King To Yeung, Alena Alamgir, Shruti Devgan, Maria Kontorinakis, Shilpa Shanbhag, Anupama Reddy, Ellorashree Maitra, Anannya Dasgupta, Sonali Barua, Sumati Sundaram, Rohan Fernandes, Naomi Miller, Santosh Tharkude, Ervin Kosta, and Mahua Sarkar have played a very important part of my life during the course of my graduate studies and beyond. Erka Kosta has been a constant friend and comrade since my first semester at Rutgers and I thank her for the emotional and intellectual support that she has unfailingly provided all these years. During my frequent visits to the archives in the UK, my friends in London- Mukundan Devarajan, Gayathri Sampath, Neha Agarwal, Amit Sharma, Namrata Ram, and Vikas Dhanuka- have been amazingly generous with their homes and with their interest in my research and this made my time at the archives easy and fun. Ritika Ganguly, Sonali Ghosh, and Bishakha Chatterjee have been such good friends since JNU and I am so glad that our friendship has continued despite living in different parts of the world. My family has been my main source of support through all these years and this dissertation would not have been possible without their inspiration. My late father-in-law, Sudhanshu Mishra, was always incredibly supportive of my work and would often encourage me not to give up on this dissertation when things seemed bleak. I thank my mother-in-law, Faruckhi Mishra, for her love, faith and support, especially during the last phase of my dissertation writing when she provided me with much-needed help in taking care of my baby, leaving me free to write without distractions every single day since his birth. My sister, Amrita Majumdar, my brother- in-law, Sudipto Mozumdar, and my niece, Anya, have provided me with love, laughter, and encouragement during this period of my life. My father, Amit Majumdar, made it possible for me to dream that I could go to a foreign university for v an advanced degree and I thank him for it. Shiraz Mishra, friend, partner, editor and occasional intellectual adversary has been relentless in his belief in my work and it is his unwavering support that has made this dissertation possible. I thank him for his unceasing love and friendship. Most of all, I owe a debt to the countless marginal migrant voices I encountered in the archives during the course of my research and it is their stories that captivated me and sustained my interest in tales of migration, making this dissertation an emotionally enriching experience. I dedicate this work to my late mother, Bithi Majumdar and my newborn son, Rehaan. My mother taught me very early that resistance is self-affirming. I hope to teach my son the same lesson someday. vi Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………..ii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………iv Chapter 1 Setting the Stage: The Imperial Citizen/Subject on the Move Introduction…………………………………………………………………1 Argument of the Dissertation……………………………………………….4 Theorizing History/Historicizing Theory…………………………………...7 Broader Implications of the Dissertation…………………………………...14 Methods…………………………………………………………………….16 Chapter Outline…………………………………………………………….20 Chapter 2 Indians Arrive in Natal: Historical Background Indentured Indians…………………………………………………………..24 Method of Recruitment and Terms of Contract…………………………….25 Arrival in Natal and Life on the Plantation…………………………………28 Passenger Indians…………………………………………………………...31 The “Coolie Community”…………………………………………………..33 Arrival of Gandhi…………………………………………………………...35 Understanding Social Context……………………………………………...39 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….51 Chapter 3 Imperial Citizens/Colonial Subjects: An Analysis of Petitions Imperial Citizenship as a Concept…………………………………………..60 Deconstructing Colonial Law……………………………………………….64 Tracking the “Third Space” and the Citizen/Subject Debate……………….69 vii Analyzing Petitions…………………………………………………………74 Chapter 4 The Concept and Practice of Satyagraha: The Resistance Phase Situating Satyagraha in South Africa………………………………………83 The Concept of Satyagraha ………………………………………………...85 Satyagraha and its Western Influences…………………………………….88 Thoreau……………………………………………………………..90 Ruskin………………………………………………………………92 Tolstoy……………………………………………………………...93 Locating Satyagraha in Indic Traditions and Histories…………………….95 The Bhagvad Gita …………………………………………………..96 Indian Legacies of Non-Violent Resistance………………………..97 The Black Act of 1906 and the Launch of Satyagraha …………………….99 Understanding the Sociological Impact of the First Campaign……………108 Imperial citizens……………………………………………………108 Gender……………………………………………………………...110 Community…………………………………………………………111 The State……………………………………………………………114