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| 1 |
ID:
116058
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The primary focus of this essay is on the representation of child labour in Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie (1936). I argue that the young-ness of Munoo, the coolie-boy is significant for understanding Anand's social critique of the colonial-capitalist machinery and its reliance upon the sub-waged labour of children and adolescents. It is limiting to read the novel as merely a social critique, however, as it also opens up crucial debates on what it means for an Indian writer writing in English to represent a young ostracised citizen-subject who can hear English and mimic its sounds without having access to an English education. Anand's use of an adolescent is thus significant as an early attempt at foregrounding regional disenfranchisement in English. Through the tropes of listening, seeing, and smelling, and Anand's selective translations and transliterations, I show why Munoo's adolescence matters: it provides a social commentary as well as enabling Anand to highlight the conundrum of representing Munoo's semi-literate, non-English subjectivity into the English language.
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| 2 |
ID:
180616
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| Summary/Abstract |
The paper seeks to locate the violence perpetrated on the bodies of the coolies in colonial Assam. The paper observes that the existing historiography on tea plantations in colonial Assam restricts corporeal violence on the coolies within the boundaries of the plantation estates and does not talk about the permeation of such violence to spaces and coolies totally outside of the plantation production process. This paper, with the evidence from a case from nineteenth-century Assam, extends the limits of corporeal violence on the coolies beyond the physical setup of the plantations. The paper proposes that histories of corporeal violence on labour in the colonial era need to look beyond the peripheries of the plantations and towards the social regimes of power under colonialism. The paper demonstrates the complicit character of the state and newly landed and moneyed native classes in the colony, which aggravated the magnitudes of violence on labour.
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| 3 |
ID:
164377
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this paper, I wish to explore the life in the mid-19th to 20th century in the Durban-based Indian Casbah and its enduring legacy. In exploring the Casbah life in Durban, I wish to pay special attention to the narratives of the people who either were associated with it and had living memories of it, or remember the many stories passed on to them by their families.1 The central question that I explore in analysing these narratives is: does Casbah in the diaspora enable the diasporic community to reconnect with their Indian origins or does it orient them away from the romantic attachment to the places of their origin in India? In other words, is Casbah a symbol of a new settlement in which the diasporic community finds lasting meaning and legacy, or does it evoke memories and myths about their origins in India?
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| 4 |
ID:
091385
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2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper considers the creation of a 'coolie' work-force for the Assam tea industry and the local dimensions of tea plantation enterprise. While the industry has flourished through its use of migrant labour and export markets for tea, it has retained important connections with the locality. The Assam tea industry was a predominantly colonial enterprise manned by white British planters. It allowed participation, albeit in subordinate and dependent roles, by local peasants and gentry, though mainly based on the labour of migrant 'coolies' recruited on indentured contracts. The prominence of 'imported' coolie workers has obscured the significance of various local groups as well as the tea industry's importance in the local 'imagination'. Despite the gradual development of nationalist antagonism towards the white 'Planters' Raj', tea enterprise retained a hallowed place for the Assamese middle classes, as tea workers continued as a racialized labouring class.
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