Introduction
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, a new and critical figure emerged in the public sphere of Hindi publications—the indentured subaltern woman. This coincided with the Indian nationalist campaign against indentured emigration. Reports, articles, editorials, letters, stories, and poems were composed about her in the vernacular. She came to be constructed by nationalists, reformers, writers, journalists, poets, elite women, and men in deeply sympathetic yet contradictory ways, often compressing the layers of meaning of her migration. A glance at this vernacular world not only reanimates histories of indentured women, but also shows how the issue came to be hotly discussed in colonial north India, giving it almost a popular and ‘mass’ character. These writings also reveal how issues of caste, class, labour, gender, family, and nation became enmeshed with emigration. The moralizing discursive practices of certain Hindi writers on the subject suggested serious attempts to rescue, rehabilitate, improve, discipline, control, police, and condemn the subaltern indentured woman---all of which unveiled a tangle of arguments of national honour, women's chastity and respectability, manual labour, sexual anxieties, notions of morality and immorality, citizenship, and ‘sorry’ sisterhood. Her simultaneous representation as an ‘innocent’ victim and also as a ‘guilty’ migrant construed her as both part of the nation and outside it.
The emigration of women as indentured labour in colonial India has provoked some significant and exciting studies. The overwhelming focus has been on their conditions in the plantation colonies.Footnote 1 We broadly get two competing perspectives, although the division between them is not clear-cut. Some historians, especially those who adopt a nationalist, anti-colonial, humanitarian, or neo-Marxist paradigm, identify indenture with slavery and argue that emigration did not lead to a lessening of gender, caste, and class exploitation.Footnote 2 Rather, these patterns were retained, institutionalized, and strengthened in the new destinations.Footnote 3 Complementing this, yet others see the migrant women ‘coolies’ as victims of various forms of greed, deception, misinformation, colonial coercion, and manipulation.Footnote 4 Emigration, they argue, not only compelled women into unfair contract regimes, but also subjected them to brutal sexual exploitation by overseers, and competition between Indian men.Footnote 5 A second group of researchers, particularly those identified with imperialist, colonialist, revisionist, and modernist schools, have instead contended that emigration was a result of rational, informed, and deliberate choices on the part of migrant Indian labourers, which led to considerable improvement in their living conditions. They equate indenture with free white labour. Further, they show that caste identities were greatly assuaged as a result of migration to new areas, as caste status in these places bore no implications for occupation or social mobility, or for resource control.Footnote 6 In a similar way, some historians insist that emigration had liberating potential and possibilities for women, particularly those belonging to lower castes and classes. In stressing the dramatic changes brought about in the lives of women, they see emigration as the best thing that could have happened to them, as such women subsequently enjoyed an unparalleled freedom from patriarchal and caste demands.Footnote 7
This article focuses not on the condition of women in the plantation colonies, on which there is ample scholarship, but on how the figure of such women came to be constructed, represented, and debated in the vibrant Hindi print-public sphere of early twentieth-century India. By unpacking these voices, we can discern the precedents of the positions just elaborated and interrogate such binaries as bad/good, moral/material, and fettered/free. As one historian has stated, the problem with such theories ‘lies in the presumption of the wholeness of cultural identity ascribed to the immigrant and indigenous groups. What is lost sight of is the contestory process by which immigrant communities are formed through their insertion and emplacement in social relations engendered by specific social formations.’Footnote 8 Another argues: ‘Both these approaches tend to view the emigrant as an object of sympathy or pity, neglecting to take into account the personal and cultural considerations involved in the complex migration process.’Footnote 9 A further flaw in such perspectives is their failure to analyse crucial changes in recruitment strategies and the broader material and social pressures which helped to maintain the dynamism of overseas labour mobilization.Footnote 10
I lend my weight to these arguments not only by examining cultural identity formations and the portrayal of women emigrants in the vernacular, but also by amplifying them with the writings of British officials and missionaries on the one hand, and on the other, the actual experiences of women themselves, particularly Dalits, as they underwent recruitment and transportation. It appears that gender and caste identities were fashioned and refashioned as much in the process of applying for migration as during the period of indenture. Although there appears to be a discord between the voices and actions of Indians and those of the colonizers, there are nevertheless conjunctural echoes between them when it comes to the question of control of women's labour and sexual flows. The movements and actions of Dalit women, however, carried far more ambiguous implications, since these involved both free and indentured movement, voluntary and forced displacement, territorial bonding and transnational migration. This implicitly intersected with the larger Dalit critique of upper-caste progressivism and nationalism, which also found parallels in a section of indentured labour. This article also underscores the deep social hierarchies within which Dalit migrants and potential migrants— especially single women—operated.
My arguments here are partly inspired by some seminal works from feminist scholars, who draw on contemporary ethnography to challenge the tendency to address women's cross-border movements and migration primarily within the framework of trafficking, and to conflate trafficking with prostitution. In her work, Ratna Kapur argues that such positions not only portray the ‘disempowered’ woman in a perpetual state of victimization, but also reveal a deep reluctance to acknowledge consensual migration. This marginalizes the rights claims of migrants and denies the subtleties of their existence.Footnote 11 Flavia Agnes contends that any analysis of the complexities of the transnational female migrant must extend beyond the confining parameters of conceptual and operational work on cross-border movements. Rather than seeing these women solely as vulnerable subjects, she terms them as risk-taking subjects.Footnote 12 Nandita Sharma, too, challenges the conservative sexual morality of the nation-states that legitimize the practice of criminalizing the migration of women. This has the effect of supporting a nationalistic consciousness of space and home.Footnote 13
I also draw upon scholarship on Dalits that has stressed the attraction for them of ‘a place elsewhere’, for transnational mobility, and for an oceanic, wider world of possibility. Dilip Menon persuasively contends that in colonial India, the blandishments of colonial modernity and mobility had a much greater appeal for many Dalits than the condescending concessions of tradition and nation.Footnote 14 Provocatively, Dalit thinker Chandra Bhan Prasad has recently come out in support of foreign direct investment in present-day India, stating that Dalits do not succeed in traditional and local enterprises, and it is new, liberalized systems of trading that can provide them with opportunities.Footnote 15 While drawing upon, and differing from, these exciting theoretical and methodological insights, debates around the indentured Dalit woman in colonial India further enrich and complicate this scholarship, while also pointing to certain continuities and fractures in a critical colonial context.
A brief history of gender and indentured emigration in colonial North India
From the nineteenth century, a new feature of colonial political economy was the import of increasing numbers of Indian indentured labourers to the various plantation economies of Fiji, West Indies, Trinidad, Natal, and Mauritius, particularly following the abolition of slavery in 1838.Footnote 16 These workers called themselves girmityas. Footnote 17 Calcutta was one of the main ports of departure for these destinations. While immigrants came from practically every province of India, the overwhelming majority, up to 80 per cent, in fact, was drawn from United Provinces and Bihar, recruited by persons especially engaged for the purpose, who worked in the interiors of the region.Footnote 18 The social composition of immigrant labour often reflected the caste structures of rural north India. Since most of the upper castes were prejudiced by their religion against overseas travel, a substantial portion of indentured labourers came from the lower castes.Footnote 19 Based upon an examination of their landing tickets, Brij Lal has argued that the largest number of emigrants came from United Provinces and belonged to the Dalit castes. Chamars alone totalled 13.4 per cent of all emigrants.Footnote 20 Furthermore, Dalits and tribals were perceived by the plantation owners as more submissive, malleable, manageable, hard working, skilful, and reliable, with no taboos surrounding food or work.Footnote 21 Basti, Gorakhpur, Gonda, Bahraich, Azamgarh, and Benaras became important centres of emigration, as the proportion of agricultural labour was high in these districts.Footnote 22 Emigration proved a kind of ‘safety valve’ for the lower castes, especially in times of land scarcity, growing pressure on land, poverty, rural employment, loss of livelihood, natural disasters and calamities, and adverse seasonal conditions.Footnote 23 The central feature of the labour system that came into being was contractual servitude at fixed wages, usually for a minimum period of five years on a plantation where the labourer was also obliged to live. After this period, an immigrant could seek repatriation to India; this provision was explicitly inserted into the contract in order to distinguish indentured servitude from slavery.Footnote 24
The gender composition of immigrant labour was skewed. Far more men than women migrated. They were usually single and in the active age group of 20 to 35.Footnote 25 Family migration was not the norm, with only 15 per cent of immigrants being married couples.Footnote 26 Nevertheless, between 28 and 40 per cent of migrants were women. This is a far from insignificant number, and yet, women migrants have tended to be portrayed as dependents and spouses, reluctant to migrate, and of negligible labour value or of dubious virtue.Footnote 27 Their migration has been largely seen as associational, although 70 per cent of women who migrated appeared to be single.Footnote 28 A high percentage of them were registered outside of their home districts, as is shown in records available from Basti, Gonda, Azamgarh, and Sultanpur. Most were women banished to the margins of society—prostitutes, widows, and Dalit women.Footnote 29 Many migrated to escape caste, class, and gender exploitation, abusive husbands, and the fetters of family.
However, the method and process of recruiting labour was highly gendered, favouring men over women. Recruiters constantly complained of the difficulty in getting female ‘coolies’, in spite of an increase in the rates of commission for registering them. The recruitment of women was also opposed by the colonial planters, as they wanted more ‘able bodied men’ to come. They resented the difficulty and expense of recruiting, transporting, and maintaining women labourers, since they were believed to introduce trouble and strife into plantation life.Footnote 30 The recruiters were also reluctant to bear the cost of reproducing a new generation of workers, maintaining women during pregnancy, and supporting other, non-producing family members.Footnote 31 At the same time, male claims to women's labour within the family were upheld; women were to be kept close to home and hearth.Footnote 32 Both structurally and institutionally, in spite of the rhetoric, it was made more difficult for women to emigrate.
In spite of these constraints, recruitment of women from Basti alone, for example, continued to increase. It was reported that female recruits numbered 274 in 1904, and this number steadily increased to 410 in 1905 and 696 in 1906. The percentage of women among the total number of people registered for emigration also increased during this period, from 22.20 per cent to 28.04 per cent.Footnote 33 The report of the protector of immigrants for the nine months ending 31 December 1915 revealed that there were more women than men among emigrants from United Provinces to Trinidad aboard one ship, the Ganges—namely, 126 women to 81 men. On another ship, the Dewa, the proportion of women emigrants was quite high—207 females to 352 males.Footnote 34 To give another example, from Benaras alone 128 men, 21 women, 6 children, and 5 infants migrated in one ship sailing to Mauritius as late as 1923.Footnote 35 Migration involved a profound transformation in the lives of all, but especially of women. It is in this context that positions and perspectives on women's emigration need to be placed.
Saving ‘wronged’ bodies
While the indentured system began as early as the 1830s, it emerged as a significant issue in the writings and speeches of reformists, nationalists, and Hindu middle-class intelligentsia only in the early twentieth century,Footnote 36 when it came to be overwhelmingly represented as a national calamity.Footnote 37 National newspapers lent their support to this position through detailed articles and letters on the subject.Footnote 38 Their emphasis on the figure of the subaltern indentured woman gave their viewpoint a particular colour and a moral and ethical edge. For a section of Indian women, nationalists, and reformers in the early twentieth century, the physical body of the emigrant woman in particular became an evocative site in which stereotypes of morality, sexuality, national honour, citizenship, sisterhood, deceit, and exploitation could be promulgated in print and press. Leading women's journals lent strength to this perspective. Novels, stories, and innumerable poems were composed around the ‘suffering’ indentured woman. While differing in their emphasis and perceptions, they were all deeply critical of the indentured labour policy, especially when it came to women.
These voices were first articulated in the indictment of indenture by Gopal Krishna Gokhale in the Legislative Assembly, first in February 1910,Footnote 39 and more forcefully in March 1912. In 1912, he not only called it ‘Slave Traffic’, but also strategically associated women, reputation, and national honour with the condemnation of indenture.Footnote 40 He noted that the system made the ‘adorable peasants immoral’ through the inclusion of women of loose character in the quota of female indenture. To substantiate his claim, he quoted Jenkins, the first agent general of Canada, saying that ‘the women are not recruited for any special work, and they certainly are not taken there for ornamental purposes’. Gokhale further added, ‘It is a shocking affair altogether, a considerable part of the population in some of these colonies being practically illegitimate.’Footnote 41
The next weapon that fell into the hands of the nationalists was the account and report of C. F. Andrews (1871–1940) and W. W. Pearson on the conditions of Indian indentured labour in Fiji. Andrews gave extensive space in the report to the moral corruption and sexual degradation of Indian women in the plantation colony. Andrews came to be seen by the Indian reformers and nationalists as a very ‘sympathetic’ observer.Footnote 42 For example, in a speech given by him to the planters in Fiji in 1815, Andrews remarked:
In India the morals amongst Hindus are strict in the matter of marriage and the home, and Hindus are very careful about their women. The women in India are very chaste but these women, well, you know what they are. . . . Indians in India have some bad qualities, but the one thing that is truly noble in them, and which has become almost a religion to them in India, is the very high marriage ideal, and here you have about 9 out of every 10 in this colony, whose ideas of marriage have simply been shipwrecked. . . . A degradation has taken place; something has happened—a serious moral degradation. . . . These coolie lines are an apprenticeship of vice. . . . The first thing is, that this bad system of recruiting, especially of unmarried people, must stop. They must be brought out under family conditions, or not at all.Footnote 43
In another place, he stated:
The Hindu woman in this country is like a rudderless vessel with its mast broken drifting on the rocks; or like a canoe being whirled down the rapids of a great river without any controlling hand. She passes from one man to another, and has lost even the sense of shame in doing so— she who in India is modest, dutiful, home-loving and chaste. . . . The Hindu woman in the coolie lines, having no semblance even of a Hindu home of her own, and living a life in a strange land divorced from all the old ties and associations of Hindu religion, has abandoned religion itself. . . . Indian women of loose character should be refused admission to the Colony under any State labour system. . . . A third remedy would be to make illegal the present common practice of a Hindu wife obtaining by a written agreement (drawn up by a lawyer) a virtual divorce from her husband without resort to a court of law.Footnote 44
Reverend John Weir Burton, a Methodist missionary, also emphasized the sexual exploitation of emigrant Indian women.Footnote 45 The Arya Samaj and the Marwari community of Calcutta became actively involved in the campaign, the former in United Provinces and Bihar and the latter through the formation of an anti-indentured emigration league. Gandhi lent his weight to the movement. Indentured emigration finally ended formally on 1 January 1920, as a result of a resolution moved in the Assembly by Madan Mohan Malaviya in 1916, although discussions around its viability and morality continued.Footnote 46 The extensive popular writings in the vernacular, particularly in Hindi, gave the campaign against indenture a particular edge.
Indentured women and the Hindi print-public sphere
The early twentieth century was characterized by one of the most dynamic phases in the Hindi public sphere. This period saw a flourishing mass print culture, which had profound implications for women. A rapid growth of public institutions, libraries, publishing houses, presses, newspapers, and books in Hindi enhanced the circulation of printed matter as a commodity. The cheapness and ubiquity of print made it possible for different people to express their distinctive ideas in the vernacular. Indentured workers, particularly the figure of the subaltern indentured woman, became one of the hot topics of the Hindi print-public sphere, and this coincided with protests by reformers, nationalists, women's organizations, and literary scholars, who made extensive use of print and press to disseminate their ideas among the wider public.
Historians have comprehensively written about the moving letter and account of Kunti, a Chamar woman from Gorakhpur who migrated to Fiji as an indentured labourer; her story gave the Hindi press and nationalists their first crucial claim to the righteousness of their campaigns.Footnote 47 In the letter, Kunti alleged an attempted rape on her by a white overseer on 10 April 1913, while she was weeding an isolated banana patch. The format and composition of the letter indicated that it was designed for publication, and it was widely circulated in the media, with the anti-indenture Hindi newspaper Bharat Mitra taking the lead.Footnote 48 Kunti's letter sparked a fierce reaction and an intense campaign against outrages on the ‘indentured daughters of India’ and was soon followed by Totaram Sanadhya's (1876–1948) Hindi book Fiji Mein Mere Ikkis Varsh (My Twenty-One Years in Fiji), published in November 1914,Footnote 49 which went into its third edition in 1916 and was also translated into Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, and Urdu.Footnote 50 Sanadhya, who had spent 21 years as an indentured labourer in Fiji, presented a moving, first-hand account, with poignant passages on the sexual abuse of women. Ghost-written for Sanadhya by Banarsidas Chaturvedi, the book became a key Hindi text in the nationalist discourse on the abolition of indenture.Footnote 51 Baba Ramchandra, the famous peasant leader of Awadh, who had also returned from Fiji, added fuel to fire with his writings. It appears to me that indentured workers who came back to India and became public spokespersons, whether Kunti, Sanadhya, or Baba Ramchandra, soon began to appropriate and articulate a narrow language of nationalism, rather than framing their polemics in a wider and more expansive notion of transnational rights. At the same time, Hindi translations of Andrews’ works soon appeared which had a much wider circulation and impact.Footnote 52 The newspaper Abhyudaya regularly carried Hindi translations of Andrews’ lectures and speeches in this period.
Women's journals were not left behind, and it was one of the earliest, most respected, and leading Hindi women's periodicals of the time, Stri Darpan (Women's Mirror)---edited by women---that seized upon the issue most emphatically. With the substantial support of several female members of the affluent Nehru family, Rameshwari Nehru—a Kasmiri Brahmin woman married to Brijlal Nehru—was its chief editor.Footnote 53 In 1917 and again in 1920, the magazine brought out at least four issues which gave extensive coverage to the subject of indenture, with a special focus on women.Footnote 54 Since the journal was also the mouthpiece of the Prayag Mahila Samiti (Women's Assembly Allahabad), founded by Rameshwari Nehru in 1909, it covered speeches on the subject of indenture given in that forum, along with editorials, articles, and letters by prominent women associated with the journal. Hindi translations of the lectures and letters of Andrews were carried alongside, which built up a picture of terrible calamity.Footnote 55 Eminent poets and writers soon joined in, voicing their protest. The celebrated ‘Rashtra Kavi’ (national poet), Maithilisaran Gupt, composed his poem ‘Fiji’, in which women once more became a critical focus, with implicit references to the plight of Kunti. Mannan Dwivedi ‘Gajpuri’ wrote a novel, Ramlal, which also focused on the issue.Footnote 56 Premchand, the most prominent Hindi novel and story writer of the time, also produced a story on the subject called ‘Shudraa’.Footnote 57
Banarsidas Chaturvedi, a leading Hindi journalist, contributed immensely to the cause, not only by transcribing Sanadhya's book for him, but also by writing Pravasi Bharatvasi (1918) and Fiji ki Samasya (1927), in which he condemned the indenture system from the point of view of a committed nationalist.Footnote 58 More significantly, he was invited as guest editor to publish special issues on overseas Indians by various contemporary Hindi journals. Such issues were taken out by some important Hindi journals, including Maryada, Vishal Bharat, and most significantly Chand, with Chaturvedi as editor. For example, the April 1920 issue of Vishal Bharat carried a lengthy article by Sanadhya. Long after indentured labour was formally abolished, the condition of Indians overseas continued to provide fertile subject matter to the Hindi press. The most formidable and voluminous collection on the subject, running to more than 300 pages, came out as a special issue of the Hindi journal Chand in January 1926. As its specially invited editor, Chaturvedi effectively used his widespread contacts in various colonies to compile a considerable number of contributors in the issue. This unique collection contained diverse articles on almost all aspects of indenture, including reports and poems, mostly in Hindi but also some in English. Again, women became a special focus here, with at least five long poems and four articles published exclusively on them.
Certain features stand out in the extensive range of writings in Hindi on the figure of the indentured woman, which suggests this issue assumed a central role in the nationalist agenda. There was, of course, a sense of deep pity for the ‘helpless’, ‘broken’ woman, perpetually in a state of victimhood, in all these contributions. Maithilisaran Gupt mourned poetically:
dekho, dur khet mein hai veh kaun dukhini nari,
padi papiyon ke pale hai veh abla bechari.Footnote 59
[See, who is that suffering woman in the distant fields,
The helpless damsel fallen in the hands of the wicked.]
It was not enough, however, to speak on behalf of the indentured woman. She had to represent herself, in her own voice, even if filtered through and mediated by men. As is well known, it was Swami Manoharanand Saraswati—an Arya Samajist who had come to Fiji in 1912—who composed the letter for Kunti, written as if by Kunti herself. Many men went a step further and wrote poems in the form of ‘testimonies’ by women themselves, grieving over their pitiable condition. With liberal use of ‘main’ (‘I’), these were written as accounts in the first person. Though ostensibly meant to describe the first-hand experiences of indentured women, they were intended more to titillate than inform the readers. One, called ‘Pravasini Baala’ [Overseas Damsel], cried:
baithi main pravasini baala!
karun vilaap ‘kalap’ karti hoon,
sehti kasht kasaala!! Footnote 60
[I, the overseas damsel, sit.
Distressingly lamenting and crying for pity,
Enduring unbearable hardships.]
Another poem, aptly titled ‘Pravasini Bharatvasini’ [Overseas Indian Woman], soulfully mourned:
chaati phadti, sir dukhta hai, kehne mein aati hai laaj!
kintu kahen man ki hum kisse, he bharat ke purush samaj?. . .
ha! kya-kya maine bhoga hai, suno, karo pathar chaati. . . .
mata sita ka hit kitna, racha gaya bhaari sangram,
ek draupdi ki lajja ka, samar mahabharat tha daam. . . .
aryon ke pavitra shonit mein, nahin ushnta hai kya aaj,
bhai khada dekh sakta hai, jaati jo behnon ki laaj! Footnote 61
[Our heart breaks, and head hurts, and we feel ashamed of saying!
But, oh the men of India, who else do we dare open our soul to?. . . .
Oh! What all have I gone through, hear with a strong heart. . . .
A heavy battle was created for the welfare of mother Sita,
and the fruit of Mahabharat was the price to pay for one Draupadi's honour. . . .
In the pure blood of the Aryans, is there no fieriness left today,
As the brother stands and watches his sisters being shamed.]
The poem evoked multiple metaphors and images simultaneously. In it, the indentured overseas woman was represented as a citizen of the Indian nation, and yet outside it, completely disempowered as a result of her indentured status, and crying for help from the men of her country. Her narrative was interspersed constantly with horror stories. Furthermore, images of Sita and Draupadi were used to highlight the epic battles fought in their name, which were contrasted with the utter neglect of indentured women by the nation and its men. The application of tropes like the kidnapping of Sita and the ‘disrobing’ of Draupadi allowed for myriad readings, and could be metaphorically analogous with the condition of the indentured woman. An allegory of the brother–sister relationship was employed to make the plea stronger, mocking the brother's masculinity, since he was a mute witness to his ‘sister’s’ rape.
Using similar idioms, another poem expressed its derision thus:
ek draupadi ka prabhuvar tha tumne cheer badhaya,
ek sati sita ke karan tha sangram machaya.
hai! aaj lakhon ablaen pari khalon ke pale –
kahan aaj ho he man mohan! natkhat veena vale!! Footnote 62
[Dear God, you lengthened the cloth draped over one Draupadi,
And for one sati Sita, you waged a massive war.
Today lakhs of damsels are in the clutches of these villains –
Where are you today oh Krishna! The one with the naughty flute!!]
In such poems, these powerless, passive, abused victims without resource were enlisted by nationalist rhetoric to ridicule Indian/Hindu masculinity and to issue a clarion call to Indian men, nation, and Hindu Gods to come to their rescue and protect them.
In order to lend flesh and blood to the misery of overseas women, some writers gave them faces and names, combining reality with fiction. Zahur Baksh (1897–1964), the prolific writer for Chand and famous for a series of sensational ‘first-person confessions’ under the heading ‘Samaj ke Agni Kund’ (Wells of Fire in Society), in which he assumed the voice of the suffering woman, wrote a piece in the January 1926 issue titled ‘Main Patit Kaise Hui’ (How I Was Degraded). Once again he described the pain of a woman taken overseas by an arkati (recruiting agent). He even gave the name of the ship in which she was taken, and added such statements as ‘I had to satisfy the sexual lust of 15–30 men every day.’Footnote 63 The supposedly personalized account heightened the impact of the melodramatic narrative.
In several of these narratives, explicit links were made between emigrant women, water, and virtue. Beginning with Kunti, her account emphasized how, with great difficulty, she managed to free herself from the overseer and, to protect her chastity, jumped into a river and was rescued by a boy on a nearby boat. In the emotional songs inspired by Kunti, the power of flowing water was perpetually present and audible:
satiyon ka dharma digane ko jab, anyayon ne kamar kasi;
jal agam mein Kunti kud pari. Footnote 64
[When the evil forces resolved to shake the religion of the pure women,
Kunti jumped in the seamless water.]
Embedding Kunti in his poem, Maithilisaran Gupt repeated this connection:
dekho, kaun daur kar sehsa kud pari veh jal mein,
paap jagat se pind chuda kar dubi aap atal mein. Footnote 65
[See who in that distant place, jumped suddenly into the water,
Relieving herself from the evil world, she drowned herself in the endless waves.]
Choosing as his protagonist a low-caste woman, Gaura, Premchand's story ‘Shudraa’ told how she was tricked and duped into going overseas, and again the story ended as she took her own life by jumping into the river. From Kunti to Gaura, from ‘real’ to ‘mythical’, there appeared a symbiotic relationship between indentured women, water, and virtue. Jumping or drowning in the water was a metaphor for both the preservation of the woman's chastity and the punishment of the ‘unchaste’ woman. It was like a ‘trial by water’, which signified both an escape for ‘innocent’ victims, as in the case of Kunti, and drowning as ‘shame’ for their apparent transgression, promiscuity, and sexual impurity. The ‘good’ victims were assisted and protected by the water, while the ‘bad’ women were punished by drowning. Water absorbed them, either to save their virtue, or to ‘drown’ their ‘disgraced’, debauched, and tragic lives.
The sea was also borderless and unidentifiable, where certainties of place, nationality, and identity were dissolved. The force of the flowing water, particularly the ordeal of the sea, not only disturbed ideas of borders and national belonging, but also embodied the cruelties of indenture, loss of humanity, tears, struggles, and death. The sea passage, equated with the mythology of the kala pani (black water), figured large in the arguments of the anti-migration lobby.Footnote 66 Its symbolic association with barriers, transitions, and journeys separated women from their family and drove them away from their land and nation. However, water was also fluid, and no space was proof against its invasive power. While to upper castes travelling overseas by water was a caste taboo, Dalits and women seemed to have had a much more ambiguous view about crossing the ocean: it was also identified as the passage to opportunity, jobs, emancipation, and a positive hope of a better life in an unseen world.Footnote 67 Some of them had long-established traditions of migration in search of employment.Footnote 68 Many folk songs of Dalit emigrants from north India represented their journey by sea as an ‘escape’ from the oppressions of caste, Brahmanic Hindu religion, economy, and nation.Footnote 69
At the same time, the implicit biases against Dalits, particularly Dalit woman, also appeared within the movement. Kunti was, of course, applauded for her courage. Titled ‘The Cry of an Indian Woman from Fiji’, Bharat Mitra wrote:
In spite of Kunti being from the cobbler caste, she has surpassed many high class women through the courage shown by her in jumping into the stream to save her chastity. This will gain for her a place in the list of honourable and brave women. Our country women should learn a lesson from the way in which she treated the immigration officer. Even on critical occasions one ought to stand by virtue. There was a time when our country had many women like Kunti, but unfortunately that condition does not prevail now.Footnote 70
While reflecting the pain of Kunti, such writings also depended upon stereotypes of caste, religious duty, and honour. The argument implied that ‘in spite’ of being a Chamar woman, Kunti deserved to be eulogized and applauded for her ‘bravery, patience and strength of mind’.Footnote 71 The victimized Chamar woman was glorified and acquired subjecthood only when she emulated the virtues and ideals of upper-caste Indian womanhood and wifely devotion, thereby overcoming the perceived stereotypes of Dalit woman. The colonial authorities, however, called into question the character of Kunti by stating that she had concocted the incident. They saw in Kunti the image of the degraded Dalit emigrant woman who was partly responsible for her condition; they suggested she was immoral, amorous, and quarrelsome, implying that this was only to be expected from a woman of her class.Footnote 72 In a way, Kunti symbolized the ‘crisis’ that beset women in the plantation colonies, where they were both victims and perpetrators, eliciting sympathy but also being obscurely threatening.
The prominence given to the victimized woman, however, also provided reformers and nationalists with a strong moral opportunity to condemn colonial rule, and more explicitly, the overseer and the ‘beastly’ white-skinned man. Kunti had alleged attempted rape against a white overseer. Baba Ramchandra wrote that beautiful women were being constantly molested by white men. Even pregnant women were not spared, and were compelled into constant intercourse, which often resulted in abortion.Footnote 73 Reiterating the cruelty of white men, ‘Pravasini Bharatvaasini’ recited:
nar-pischach hain yahan bahut se, gore hain stritva ghaati. Footnote 74
[There are innumerable male-demons here, and whites the destroyers of womanliness.]
Maithilisaran Gupt recapitulated:
geedh mari lothen khate hain overseer nirantar
haath chalate yahan humari jeeti ablaon par. Footnote 75
[Constantly striking as vultures over corpses, the overseers
Constantly molest our living frail women.]
Describing the life of these women as a hell created by the white man, another poem declared:
bhutal par yadi jivit dukh ka, nark dekhna chaho—
in gorang pischach, khalon ka nyay dekhna chaho.
hridya thaam lo zara vachakon, kuli lain mein aao.
dekh durdasha in behnon ki do-do ashru bahao!!. . .
durbhagini in ablaon ko, kya-kya sehna hoga?
dukh purn is nark lok mein, kab tak rehna hoga? Footnote 76
[If you want to see the hell of live misery on the surface of this earth—
If you want to see the justice of these white demonic villains.
Hold your heart witnesses, and come to the ‘coolie’ lane.
See the misery of these sisters and shed many tears!!. . .
What all will these unfortunate powerless women have to go through?
Till when will they have to live in this painful world of hell?]
The ‘injured body’ of the emigrant woman served as a powerful metaphor for advancing the interests of the reformers and the nationalists, for it allowed a scathing moral attack on colonial ‘misrule’. She provided a kind of legitimating structure within which to reinforce protest against the ‘illegitimacy’ of British policies of indentured labour.
Stri Darpan in particular took up the cause of their overseas ‘sorry’ subaltern sisters, speaking on their behalf, and attempting to establish bonds of diasporic sisterhood across region, caste, and class. Various women writers in the magazine took upon themselves the mantle of rescuing and saving the suffering emigrant woman.Footnote 77 It also enabled the journal to makes its voice heard in a more ample arena, with a vision not just for women but for the nation. In many ways it was speaking in harmony with other nationalists of the times and simultaneously representing moral feminists and nationalists. Further, it lent the periodical a ‘political’ orientation. A deputation of prominent Indian women went to meet the viceroy about this issue, including Sarojini Naidu, who was actively associated with this campaign.Footnote 78 An Indian representative summarized the content of telegrams sent to Lady Chelmsford, wife of the viceroy: ‘There was an intensely strong feeling of concern. . . (which included) ladies who lived in purdah, but read the news.’Footnote 79 In a certain sense, the campaign can be regarded as a precursor to the national movement, with women playing a critical role. It has been observed that the move to stop the degradation of Indian women on colonial plantations attracted more support among the Indian masses than any other movement in modern Indian history, more even than the movement for independence. These women and men revealed a ‘wounded attachment’ to the subaltern emigrant women and saw in a ‘damaged other’ a justification for their own interventionist impulses.Footnote 80
In the process however, indentured women's bodies became central to the debate. Reformers and nationalists denigrated the labouring identity of these women by explicitly focusing on their sexual identity. They conflated indenture with prostitution, constantly reiterating the loss of women's izzat (honour) in the degradation of girmit (indentured labour). Rather than viewing them as exploited workers, they were seen as unwilling objects and goods of exchange between unscrupulous men. In this way, sympathy for indentured women was transformed into a concern about their ‘moral filth’ and ‘depraved lives’. Issues of Stri Darpan repeatedly stressed the highly immoral lives emigrant women were forced to lead in the colonies, and this often took priority over their dismal living conditions. The horror of a multiplicity of sexual partners or husbands was constantly invoked and was assumed to be ‘true’ by all. Maithilisaran Gupt wrote:
das nar peeche teen nariyan thaki aur shankit-si,
dekho, laut rahi hain kaisi pathar mein ankit-si. Footnote 81
[Three women behind every ten men, tired and afraid,
See, are walking back as if carved in stone.]
The poem ‘Kuli Line Mein Pravasi Behnen’ [Emigrant Sisters in Coolie Lines] reiterated the sexualized nature of exploitation, adding to the urgency and drama of the movement against indenture:
chaar mard peeche hoti hai ek abhagini nari—
apne praan bacha kar mano lajja kahin sidhari. Footnote 82
[Behind every four men, there is one helpless woman—
And honour vanishes to save one's life.]
In tandem, Stri Darpan stated with disgust that these women, mostly lower caste, were abandoning one man after another, or living simultaneously with many men, forsaking all shame, honour, chastity, and virtue. Any expression of non-conjugal female sexuality was seen by Stri Darpan as the highest form of moral degeneration to which indentured women had succumbed. Potential women migrants were seen as prostitutes-in-waiting who had to be prevented from going abroad at all costs. Endorsing Andrews and emphasizing Hindu shastras (Hindu scriptures) and religion, Nandrani Nehru wrote in an important editorial for the magazine:
Our shastras do not allow more than one husband and even widow remarriage is considered bad. How then can we tolerate such laws in which women constantly change husbands or have multiple ones? We will not allow any woman worker to be sent to these colonies.Footnote 83
It was also argued that the emigration of women often covered traffic of an undesirable character. The limited wealth and money that these women acquired was treated as sinful. Nandrani Nehru continued:
We do not need such money, which is earned after so much of disgrace. . . . They just need such women in colonies who are either prostitutes or those who can be made into prostitutes. We strongly oppose any more women being sent to these colonies.Footnote 84
The emphasis on the ‘immoral character’ of such women gave the campaign a distinctly traditional, patriarchal tone. The alleged immoralities, obscene behaviour, and lack of shame among emigrant women posed a serious threat to the moralities of middle-class, upper-caste reformers, and spread anxiety and panic among them, not least the women. This also implicitly strengthened an ‘us–them’ divide. The subaltern diasporic woman was the ‘outsider’, a duped, almost stupid, dim-witted woman, who was not allowed to, and indeed could not, think or speak for herself; her ‘superior sisters’ had to speak on her behalf and wean her away from the dangers lurking in unknown lands. The bonds of imagined sisterhood and citizenship, thus forged, were also deeply hierarchical. For immigrant women, such concerns represented a double-edged sword. They were targets of the moralizing impulses of nationalists, whose mission was to cleanse and sanitize the immorality of the colonies; but this could very well encompass condemnation of the indentured woman herself, who had the audacity to indulge in such practices, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, since it meant she had forfeited all her moral moorings. In principal, however, the fact that there were many more men than women on the plantation may have empowered some women, who may have valued the right to ‘change husbands’.
The migrant woman was always conceived of and depicted as duped, deceived, cheated, forced, coerced, abducted, or kidnapped. Marina Carter has argued that while the deception argument may have been valid for an initial period, the notion that indentured migrants remained indefinitely ignorant of their destinations is untenable.Footnote 85 Similarly, while Brij Lal concedes that the recruitment process was sometimes based on fraud, he maintains that the extent of this fraud has been exaggerated. He attributes emigration chiefly to the poor economic and social position of certain classes and castes in India, rural poverty and dislocation, especially in times of famine, and explains that a new place outside India offered the possibility of moving out of the caste system.Footnote 86
Yet, numerous writings of the period pointed to the coercive nature of emigration, stressing that women in particular were always misinformed and misled by the recruiters, and often held captive against their will. It was repeatedly alleged that women were being abducted by the emigration agents in various parts of United Provinces and Bihar, for example, in Azamgarh and Gorakhpur. Pilgrimages by women to shrines and temples, fairs, festivals, and railway stations were identified as the main sites of such kidnappings.Footnote 87 One educated native man remarked, ‘The system of recruiting females is open to grave objection. Great atrocities are committed under its cover. Frequently the recruiters and their men entice away wives and daughters from poor and even respectable families, never mentioning to them the real object for which they are wanted.’Footnote 88 Grierson, in his report, also pointed to the prevalence of this view in north India. The Hindi public sphere endorsed these opinions. Premchand's low-caste Gaura was thus tricked into going overseas. A poem ran:
isi durdasha ko keh-keh kar, ha dushton ne behkaya.
bahu chal karke, phir bal karke, humko yahan bhej paya. Footnote 89
[Repeatedly stressing our miserable conditions, these scoundrels deceived us.
Cheating us at many levels, and then using force, they were able to send us here.]
The emphasis on coercive aspects of women's migration was in some measure driven by sexually and morally conservative agendas, allied to the demands of the nation. It was meant to restrict and curtail women's migration, while increasing moral surveillance of their lives, and reiterating their embodiment in nationalist ideologies. Any recognition of ‘voluntariness’ on the part of woman was a threat to the nation's integrity. The resistance to emigration also relied heavily on the alleged cheating of such women and the suffering they endured. They were portrayed as helpless victims of an inhuman system, tricked into going abroad, and in need of immediate rescue. Although indentured women often found themselves victims of forced labour and sexually exploitative conditions, it does not follow that they were recruited only through coercion or that all were reduced to slavery. The possibility that migration of women could at times occur voluntarily and with informed consent, to escape caste, class, and patriarchal oppressions, or as a way of bettering their situation, was not even perceived.Footnote 90 In the process, the indentured women were shown as incapable of any independent decision-making and were denied any opportunity for self-representation.
Single women, caste, and migration: colonial administration and women's voices
While stressing patriarchal authority, familial ties, and caste affinities, many writings evinced a particular horror at single women migrating on their own, unaccompanied by any male. Grierson had noted in his important report that troubled, abandoned, unfaithful, single, and destitute women would make the best women emigrants. He wrote:
Married women who have made a slip, and who have either absconded from their husband's house with or without a lover, or who have been turned out of door by their husbands . . . I consider the most hopeful class for emigration purposes. . . . I do not think that any one can say that the recruiting of these poor creatures is anything but good both for themselves and for the country. . . . Even in the worst managed colonies, the material condition of women is far better than that of men. . . . There seems to me to be everywhere too great a tendency to treat a native woman as an ignorant child. . . . A native woman, married or single, has a perfect power to enter into a contract binding on herself, and (to quote the Collector of Shahabad on this subject) ‘women have at law a right like men to go where they please, and I would not take it away’.Footnote 91
Pitcher, who prepared another significant report, was also of the opinion that emigration accorded single destitute women a second chance.Footnote 92 However, single women became special targets of attack in the Hindi print sphere. An editorial in Stri Darpan stated:
We have to ensure that not even a single woman on her own goes to these colonies. Otherwise she is bound to become corrupt. Men should come back from these colonies on a holiday, marry in their own jati [caste] and take their wives with them. Till the protection of married men, women have no future or salvation in these colonies.Footnote 93
Single potentially migrant women were rendered suspect, not only by the reformists and the nationalists, but also by the British officials. While theoretically arguing that emigration to colonies offered an ‘escape to freedom’, particularly to low-caste and widowed single women,Footnote 94 in actual practice and on the ground, British officials were often pulled in different and opposite directions.Footnote 95 On the one hand, many of the officials strongly refuted the allegations made by the reformers and nationalists about the sexual exploitation of ‘coolie’ women by European overseers,Footnote 96 stating that ‘immoral’ relations were ‘not tolerated’. On the other hand, they reiterated the prevalence of immorality between Indians themselves, pointing out that ‘the trouble originated in the class of women who emigrated, since the majority of them were single women and some were even prostitutes’.Footnote 97 Many officials and missionaries working in Fiji, for example the Methodist Cyril Bavin, deplored that Indian women emigrating to Fiji were of a low character, and emphasized their ‘dark and degraded minds’ and ‘moral degradation’.Footnote 98 Single low-caste women came to be perceived as more liable to indulge in immoral sexual conduct. There was also scepticism about the recruitment of single women due to its implications for family life and its destabilizing consequences, as control over their labour and sexuality went away from the arena of the household.Footnote 99 It was strongly recommended by many officials not to recruit ‘disreputable’ single women and instead recruit only families.Footnote 100
The disdain with which single low-caste women migrants were seen was also reflected in the fact that they faced multiple difficulties in migrating. It was an unwritten rule that such women be scrutinized thoroughly and their credentials checked. The officials tended to support families’ legal claims that women's migration was by definition involuntary, because women were incapable of consenting to the offers of recruiters, and therefore their compliance was meaningless and impossible.Footnote 101 There were continuous complaints regarding the arbitrary conduct of the registering officials, particularly in relation to low-caste, poor women who arrived unaccompanied and reported themselves as single. They were often constrained, confined, harassed, and incarcerated, and their registration was delayed or refused.Footnote 102 Section 32(2) of the Indian Emigration Act allowed the detention for ten days of women who came alone but were believed to be married. It was the duty of the registering officer to register all such women emigrants within that period, but they were often detained for much longer. Often they were denied registration if there was even a slight suspicion that they were married and had left their husband behind.Footnote 103 Whenever a single woman was produced, the registering officer described the case as ‘suspicious’ and deferred registration for long periods. Asked to define the word ‘suspicious’, he usually had no specific answer; but some light may be shed on the interpretation of the term from the following remark in one of the sub-depot inspection books: ‘Inspected the sub-depot today. Only one female coolie admitted this very morning. She has got a little jewel on her, hence her case seems suspicious.’ This was far from adequate reason for almost a month's detention. Single women were not only kept for long periods for enquiry, but the process of obtaining certificates for them was lengthy and complicated. There was abundant evidence from various districts of United Provinces that long and illegal detentions of single low-caste women, under the pretext of enquiry, were frequent.Footnote 104 It was further reported, for example from Basti, that many such women who had been refused registration were driven by want to become prostitutes in the region.Footnote 105
Indian magistrates also interfered with the registration of single women, because they were convinced that such women were either being coerced into indentured emigration or fleeing the authority of fathers or husbands. They also tried to discourage single women from migrating by using arguments based on what Duncan G. Pitcher described as ‘religious prejudices’. A circular issued to all commissioners of division in the North Western Provinces in 1879 stated: ‘In all cases where married women present themselves for registration, especially when they usually reside in another district, it should be ascertained in the best way available whether the husband is alive or dead, and, in the former case, whether he has any objection to his wife becoming an emigrant.’Footnote 106 The magistrate of Muttra stated that many of the detained, single women who came for registration declared their husbands to be dead, and the truth of that had to be determined. ‘Free’ and detached from parental, spousal, and male authority, these single low-caste women were demonized, and their emigration was made virtually impossible. The prospect of such women working for wages and reproduction of their own labour, whether as labourers or prostitutes, was alarming—and indeed threatening—to notions of the order, virtue, and civility of both the nationalists and the colonialists. This significant restriction of single women's recruitment demonstrates that nationalist and colonial opinion, often quite unintentionally, worked in concert.
However, there are many examples, particularly of Dalit women from the Chamar and Pasi castes, posing as single women, falsifying their residences and names, and coming of their own accord to emigrate.Footnote 107 Of all women emigrants to Fiji, for example, 16 per cent belonged to the Chamar caste, a higher proportion than any other caste.Footnote 108 Brij Lal also argues that the high registration of women outside their districts proves that many women were quite mobile, contradicting the view that they were tradition/caste-bound and stayed at home;Footnote 109 this was particularly true of Dalit women. There were also instances of women eloping with their lovers, running away from their villages, and then meeting recruiters in order to become enlisted and escape the clutches of their families.Footnote 110 Many women used emigration to run away from violence in marital homes and to escape abject poverty. Even while lamenting migration, we hear women's voices, indirectly and unintentionally, in some of the poems composed by nationalists. One goes:
bharat mein bhukhi marti theen, ismen hai apna kya dosh.
chod use jo hum aayi hain, isse kahin na karna rosh! Footnote 111
[We were dying of hunger in India, what is our fault in this.
Leaving that we came here, do not hold this against us.]
Various Bhojpuri terms like urdhari (a woman who lives with a man who is not her husband), dolkarhi (a woman who has been taken to the bridegroom, for whom the bridegroom did not take a barat, or marriage procession), and gharkali (a woman who has taken up residence with a man without marrying him), largely prevalent among emigrant workers of northern India, tell us something about the mobility of migrant women. As one scholar observes:
These terms are indications of the desire and the ability of some Bhojpuri women to walk out of unhappy homes, whether natal or of the in-laws. The standard police reports about women getting lost in melas [fairs] and never returning home, and the significant migration of single women to plantations in Assam and in Fiji make sense in terms of a pre-existing mobility of women, which can't be reduced to the attractions and enticements of a distant labour market alone.Footnote 112
Some women even used the recruiter to their advantage: they were clothed and fed, and once strong and healthy, they changed their minds and walked away from him.Footnote 113 It is also significant that very few women returned to India, even after completing their compulsory term in the plantation colonies.Footnote 114
I will end this section by quoting from a revealing report from United Provinces, which, while exposing the patriarchal bias of the colonial administration, also confirms that some single women, particularly Dalits, came of their own accord, minus their men, to migrate:
Women came forward in abundance [for emigration]. . . . Musammat Radhia, a Chamarin from Zillah Azimghur, Village Fatehpur was recruited by a person called Bhanjun. On an enquiry made through the Azimghur police it appeared that she had falsified her residence. . . . Musammat Bachia, a Chamarin from Ghazipore, village Isripur was refused registration. . . . I tried my best to trace out her home, and to ascertain as to whether her husband was alive and willing to let her go, and owing to her having given false information I could not trace her husband. . . . Similarly Lakhia a Pasin of Ghazipore, village Paharpur was not registered because orders were sent to the police to enquire if the husband of the woman was alive, and, if he was alive, to ascertain from him whether he was willing to his wife becoming an emigrant. No reply was received. . . . Rukia a Chamarin of Ghazipore, village Karampore was refused registration because it was claimed that she had falsified her name.Footnote 115
Dominant narratives of both nationalists and colonialists are at odds with such records of women's experiences, whose needs were rendered invisible by the British and the nationalists alike. These women perhaps occupied and negotiated ambiguous spaces represented by home and away, the national and the transnational, and the inside and the outside. Emigration and indenture dramatically restructured their position, as well as their relationship to men. If circumstances demanded, they left their husbands when their life became constantly embroiled in tension and torment, or was in any way endangered.Footnote 116 It cannot be denied that those women who managed to migrate did so in a highly gendered atmosphere. They faced sexual and economic exploitation, but with all its problems, it may have also been for them an opportunity to better their material conditions and to overcome social and caste oppression, as well as an avenue for social mobility.
Conclusion
Discussions by nationalists on the issue of migration, supported by virulent opposition to indentured labour, were rooted in an intensely privileged understanding of the Indian nation. They were also profoundly gendered, as the figure of the woman was called upon to play a particular role in the writings against indenture. She was represented in such a way as to burden her in public discussion with particular features, calculated to produce certain morally loaded meanings in any debate over indenture. She was also required as a symbolic figure in the nationalist armoury against the colonial government. The Hindi print-public sphere in particular became a fertile ground for mobilizing gendered concepts of belonging, and for inflecting the campaign against indenture with middle-class reformist and nationalist idioms. These reformers, nationalists, and middle-class women undertook the task of thinking, speaking, and acting on behalf of the emigrant woman, and deciding what was good for her.
While it had its roots in India, the campaign also proved an enabling discourse for middle-class women, who could represent their afflicted subaltern overseas sisters as in need of their urgent assistance, while maintaining their subordinate position. Reforms around indentured women were altruistic acts, and in the discourse of ‘rescue’, these women could only be marked as ‘victims’. The gender of the women campaigners allowed them—it was believed—to feel for the supposedly miserable indentured women, but since they were anchored to their superior caste/class position by their impeccable morals, this sympathy was prevented from becoming identification. The result was their attitude was invariably patronizing or censorious. However, the vast majority of indentured women did not, indeed could not, be integrated into the moral economy of the middle class. In many ways, they remained the ‘other’, leaving the safety of their home and nation, its boundary, and its sanctity.
The troubled, victimized, sexually exploited, and vulnerable figure of the emigrant woman became both metaphor and common rhetorical device for the crisis that beset indenture. Narrow and causal connections were drawn between prostitution and indenture. At the same time, regardless of the conditions of labour, distinctions between consensual, exploitative, and forced migration were elided. The condescending upper-caste commentary on migrant women, many of them Dalit, not only denied women any agency, but also saw migration purely as exploitation rather than as a possible opportunity. Even when the subaltern indentured woman was seen sympathetically, the progressive edge of the anti-indenture movement was considerably blunted by its compassionate conservatism. While exposing the exploitation and inhumanity inherent in the system of indenture, deep-seated anxieties around ‘sexual slavery’ also arose, since it presented a moral crisis of unprecedented portions. This led to slippery statistics and hazy definitions, which suggested that the dangerous, disruptive sexuality of the indentured woman required scrutiny and control. She was both a citizen of the nation and a hindrance to citizenship because of her ‘inappropriate’ conduct, an insider and an outsider, a part of ‘us’ and the ‘other’, an innocent victim and a guilty migrant. Stranded between belonging and unbelonging, and inferiorized as both, she was seen as in need of both protection and punishment simultaneously.
Representations of the indentured woman in the Hindi print world, while differing from colonial perspectives and official documents, often presumed and produced certain reciprocal gendered limits to migration. There were certain assumptions in the arguments of both nationalists and colonialists, particularly with regard to the migration of single women, which also determined not only the questions that were asked but also the response to them. This also revealed certain intersections between different geographical areas, local and transregional social hierarchies, and the wider power structures within which gendered subjects operated.
Narratives and experiences of women, particularly those who were single and Dalit, make emigration appear more complicated, contradictory, and ambiguous than is commonly seen. These ‘unhomely’, mobile women did not offer any simple moral tales, but demonstrated complex and multidimensional realities: they constantly negotiated regions, nations, and borders, and defied easy either/or alternatives. Occupying a liminal, untidy, ‘intimate public’ space, their mobility disturbed received ideas of identity and confused the gendered politics of belonging.
