Download Free Across The Kala Pani Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Across The Kala Pani and write the review.

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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the first reference guide to the political, cultural and economic histories that form the subject-matter of postcolonial literatures written in English.The focus of the Companion is principally on the histories of postcolonial literatures in the Anglophone world - Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, South-east Asia, Australia and New Zealand, the Pacific, the Caribbean and Canada. There are also long entries discussing the literatures and histories of those further areas that have also claimed the title 'postcolonial', notably Britain, East Asia, Ireland, Latin America and the United States. The Companion contains:*220 entries written by 150 acknowledged scholars of postcolonial history and literature;*covers major events, ideas, movements, and figures in postcolonial histories*long regional survey essays on historiography and women's histories. Each entry provides a summary of the historical event or topic and bibliographies of postcolonial literary works and histories. Extensive cross-references and indexes enable readers to locate particular literary texts in their relevant historical contexts, as well as to discover related literary texts and histories in other regions with ease.
Includes the Annual report of the Geological Survey of India, 1867-
Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking takes as point of departure the insights of Antonio Benítez Rojo, Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant on how to conceptualize the Caribbean as a space in which networks of islands are constitutive of a particular epistemology or way of thinking. This rich volumetakes questions that have explored the Caribbean and expands them to a global, Anthropocenic framework. This anthology explores the archipelagic as both a specific and a generalizable geo-historical and cultural formation, occurring across various planetary spaces including: the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, the Caribbean basin, the Malay archipelago, Oceania, and the creole islands of the Indian Ocean. As an alternative geo-formal unit, archipelagoes can interrogate epistemologies, ways of reading and thinking, and methodologies informed implicitly or explicitly by more continental paradigms and perspectives. Keeping in mind the structuring tension between land and water, and between island and mainland relations, the archipelagic focuses on the types of relations that emerge, island to island, when island groups are seen not so much as sites of exploration, identity, sociopolitical formation, and economic and cultural circulation, but also, and rather, as models. The book includes 21 chapters, a series of poems and an Afterword from both senior and junior scholars in American Studies, Archaeology, Biology, Cartography, Digital Mapping, Environmental Studies, Ethnomusicology, Geography, History, Politics, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and Sociology who engage with Archipelago studies. Archipelagic Studies has become a framework with a robust intellectual genealogy.. The particular strength of this handbook is the diversity of fields and theoretical approaches in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences that the included essays engage with. There is an editor's introduction in which they meditate about the specific contributions of the archipelagic framework in interdisciplinary analyses of multi-focal and transnational socio-political and cultural context, and in which they establish a dialogue between archipelagic thinking and network theory, assemblages, systems theory, or the study of islands, oceans and constellations.
Empire of Convicts focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. From the seventeenth century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by deportations first to the Americas and later to Australia. Case studies from the insular prisons of Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore illuminate another carceral regime in the Indian Ocean World that brought South Asia and Southeast Asia together through a global system of forced migration and coerced labor. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, Empire of Convicts narrates the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.” Anand A. Yang brings long journeys across kala pani (black waters) to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts.