A Brunei-Indian diaspora: provisional sites of travel and imagination

The number of Indians who went to Brunei during the 1940s–1960s to work as administrative and technical staff for the British Malayan Petroleum Company is relatively small. However, the community they built in Seria and the creative negotiations of their expatriate lives in Seria evoke the tropes of experience that haunt the diaspora: the nostalgia for a home elsewhere, the passage of youth, the assertions of belonging, and the hopes for a better life. Moreover, the trajectories of Brunei-Indian memories point to the ironies of colonial and postcolonial modernities that inform the global dispersion of Indian labour. This genealogy of Brunei-Indians therefore represents what Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih have characterized as ‘minor transnationalism’.Footnote ⁹ Although the narratives of Brunei Indians are situated in local sites in India and Brunei, they delineate a consciousness that is equally informed by parochial, national, and transnational imaginaries. An ethnography of Brunei Indians, therefore, is necessarily multi-sited, the stories of their travel and settlement evoking the denseness of the particular in the imperial geographies that shaped the movement of labour and capital. This genealogy of migration provides a lens through which the quotidian practices that constitute the diaspora and the agency of migrant subjects in historicizing their presence in the diaspora may be explored. The often dialectical and intersecting sites of colony and nation between which Brunei-Indian narratives travel also point to the fluid, heterogeneous boundaries and varied complexities of diasporic imaginaries. As Avatar Brah observes, ‘each . . . diaspora is an interweaving of multiple traveling; a text of many distinctive and, perhaps, even disparate narratives’.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus, Brunei-Indian sites of (be)longing and the routes/roots of Brunei-Indian nostalgia and memory denote a minor transnationalism wherein diasporic identity formation and its attendant subjectivities draw attention to alternate histories and narrative agencies. They also stage the diaspora as a valuable site of inquiry where the micropractices of subjects formed by colonial and postcolonial contingencies, and shaped by national and local interests, bring together the multiple trajectories and politics of transnational, national, and local spaces.

However, although Brah suggests that ‘multiple journeys may configure into one journey via a confluence of narratives as it is lived and re-lived, produced, reproduced and transformed through individual as well as collective memory and re-memory’,Footnote ¹¹ she cautions against ‘trans-historical universalisms’.Footnote ¹² In situating the Brunei-Indian experience within the structural and imaginative frames of Indian diasporic community formation, I bring this article into conversation with South Asian scholarship that has focused on the histories of indenture and migration and on the cultural resonances of diasporic memory and practices in contemporary locations.Footnote ¹³ Memory and nostalgia, evoked in the archive of the longing of first-generation migrants for an Indian homeland and the claims to an Indianness that linger in the cultural and religious moorings of colonial and post-colonial identities in the diaspora certainly etch Brunei Indians’ negotiations of self and community in Seria and in India. However, Brunei Indians’ claims to a diasporic cosmopolitanism, I argue, are more firmly located in genealogies of oil migration and, in my study of staff employees of the Company, shaped by white-collar aspirations and sensibilities.

In this article I draw on the oral narratives of Brunei Indians to constitute diaspora as a site of travelling histories, and the Brunei diaspora, in particular, as a travelling site from which the community mythologizes a place of origin and beginning outside the homeland. Brunei Indians’ sense of themselves as a diaspora in India—their ‘homeland’—prompts a rethinking of diaspora as a place elsewhere that is often constituted in its distance to the homeland.Footnote ¹⁴ It suggests that diaspora is named provisionally, as the community narrates itself, and sustained contingently by an acknowledgment of its situated difference. I argue that we need to be attentive not so much to place but to place-making, the processes by which people name and conjure their locations. In the retrospective worlding of their worlds, Brunei Indians’ shared archive of experience, accumulated through travel, inverts the conventional trope of diasporic ennui, the nostalgia for the homeland. At the centre of Brunei Indians’ narratives, Brunei, rather than India, is the object of wistful remembering. It is a place of origin, since the stories of Brunei Indians and their sense of themselves as a distinct community are forged here. However, although delineated through their collective experiences in Brunei, their identity as ‘Brunei Indians’ is secured in India, now the site of the diaspora. Hence they are ‘Indians’ in Brunei, and ‘Brunei Indians’ only in India. As Indians, they are part of the expatriate workforce in Seria, and as Brunei Indians they see themselves as part of an exclusive Bruneian diaspora. This sense of community is contingent on the memories kept alive by Brunei Indians who share among themselves their reminiscences. It is also provisionally asserted when Brunei Indians meet or speak with each other. In their everyday social and material interactions with friends, family, and acquaintances, Brunei Indians assume the naturalized local identities that constitute their social place in Kerala, Chennai, or Bangalore. Thus, for instance, they are Brunei Indians to their ‘Brunei friends’, while variously identified, for instance, as Malayalis, Nairs, or Syrian Christians by the local residents of the cities or towns in which they live.

Conventionally, as Engseng Ho points out, diaspora refers to ‘a particularist form of sociality’ that implicitly presumes a movement away and dispersal from a homeland of a homogenous people. Drawing on the ‘British model’, Ho inverts this model to note that contemporary formations of diaspora, in the wake of empire, often forge a homogenous community only after people have moved.Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, for the Indians who retired from Brunei to India, a collective identity as Brunei Indians is possible only after they have moved back to India. These Brunei Indians, I argue, can claim to belong to a diaspora since they assert a collective identity that is inherently possible only in a sense of permanent distance, relocation, even displacement, from a site where their long years spent there had forged a distinctive identity as Shell employees. Indeed, the classification of Indians in the Company records as staff and labour, rather than as expatriates (which was a privileged status for whites only), I would argue, naturalizes their place in Brunei as workers rather than constitutes them as migrants from elsewhere. This community, I would argue, is no less a ‘real’ diaspora than that of Indian workers in places outside India, since Brunei Indians are permanently removed from Brunei, replicate the rituals of remembering and social practices of the diaspora, affirm a shared past, and assert a singular sense of collective belonging.

Focusing, then, on the oral narratives of Brunei Indians, I explore the ways in which Brunei Indians historicize an origin outside India, the ancestral homeland. These narratives are travelling stories and stories of travel that acquire a discursive consistency as they are remembered and retold in the Brunei-Indian diaspora. They are also stories of place-making. Brunei Indians’ temporal and local subjectivities constitute an exclusive diaspora that depends on the shared experiences and cultural meanings of Indians who went to Brunei during the 1940s and 1950s. When these Indians left Brunei to return to India in the 1960s–1980s, they were no longer members of the diaspora they had inhabited in Brunei. However, their assertion of a Brunei-Indian diaspora is possible only because the sense of belonging that was forged in Brunei has travelled and been reclaimed in India. Travel makes human lives portable, while the here and there of itineraries presuppose points of reference. Hence travel provides the circuits along which Brunei-Indians’ stories are mapped, and the diaspora is constituted through these travelling narratives.

The ethnographic accounts of Brunei Indians therefore chart the diasporic imaginings that enable Brunei Indians to historicize their presence in Brunei. Drawing on recurring themes and tropes in their narratives, I explore the cognitive processes through which Brunei Indians produce the cultural meanings that make Brunei and their presence in Brunei intelligible to them. The stories of their travel, arrival, settlement, and return provide the contours of community formation in Brunei as well as their collective sense of agency in the making of Brunei. I particularly focus on those discursive practices that naturalize their presence in Brunei while emphasizing the imperial formations in which Brunei-Indians’ narratives circulate. In doing so, I argue that Brunei-Indians’ remembering of a time and place elsewhere constitutes a historical consciousness that is dependent on colonial mimicry.Footnote ¹⁶ Hence, this article also explores the ways in which Brunei-Indian lives are embedded in the colonial capitalism that brought Indian workers to Brunei, but who creatively appropriate, and also reproduce, what David Spurr has called the ‘rhetoric of empire’.Footnote ¹⁷

Genealogies: Indian migration to Brunei

Indians in Brunei in the late 1940s–1960s constituted a significant and visible expatriate community. However, Indian migration to Brunei predates this period. There is substantial archaeological and historical evidence of thriving networks of trade between Brunei and India before the seventeenth century. Until this period, Brunei, whose territory included North Borneo (present-day Sabah) and Sarawak, was a dominant regional power, with its spheres of influence extending to the Sulu archipelago and across Borneo. Located in the South China Sea, historically Brunei occupied a strategic place along the trading routes between Malaysia, China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. A. Mani points out that Indians from the Coromandel and Malabar coasts and Gujerat traded with Brunei and that camphor from Brunei was an especially valued commodity.Footnote ¹⁸ Brunei's decline as a regional power began in the seventeenth century when internal politics and the rebellion of its vassals challenged the authority of the Sultanate. By the eighteenth century, coinciding with the arrival of European powers in the region, the Sultanate of Brunei began to disintegrate. In 1841 Brunei ceded Sarawak to James Brooke, an ambitious English adventurer, and in 1865 North Borneo was leased to Claude Lee Moses, the first American consul to Brunei. Eventually, North Borneo was acquired by the North Borneo Company which was granted a royal charter to the territory by the British Parliament in 1881. Nine years later, what remained of the territory of the Brunei Sultanate came under the ‘protection’ of Great Britain. In 1907 a British Resident was installed in Brunei and the governance of the country came under the control of the British Colonial Office.Footnote ¹⁹ During this pre-First World War period, there were very few Indians in Brunei. A Pathan and a Sikh were brought to Brunei Town for police duty in 1906 and, prior to the First World War, there were some Indian traders in Brunei, but their numbers were unremarkable. A few Indians, mostly of Tamil origin, were also brought to work on rubber plantations in 1924.

Indians begin arriving in Brunei in more significant numbers only after the discovery of petroleum in Seria in 1929. According to the 1931 census of Brunei, 249 Indians were employed by the Company and 61 Indians were employed by the four European rubber estates in Brunei; of these Indians, 215 spoke Malayalam, while 119 spoke Tamil.Footnote ²⁰ The Japanese occupation of Brunei of 1942–1945 halted Indian migration to Brunei, and the 1946 census records only 179 Indians in Brunei. One Brunei Indian, who had been taken to Brunei after the war by his brother, noted that his brother went to Brunei ‘a long time ago before that. He was there [during] the Japanese occupation. And he was working under [the] Japanese also’. Shiva Natarajan, who had worked for the Brunei government and been closely associated with the Company's Indian staff, recalled: ‘You have heard of Kampong Ayer [a water village built over the Brunei river and alongside Brunei Town]? Inside, I had met three or four fellows who had come prewar . . . married to some local ladies.’ Presumably, a significant number of Indians had left Brunei in the wake of the Japanese advance or right after the war. The dominance of Malayalis and Tamils in the oilfields is reiterated by W. J. Peel, the British Resident, who in his Annual Report on Brunei for the year 1946 noted that the Indians are ‘practically all of South Indian stock, mostly Tamils and Malayalis’.Footnote ²¹ The Indians I interviewed recollected meeting one or two people of Tamil, Malayali, Sindhi, and Punjabi origin who had settled in Brunei in the early years of the twentieth century.

A significant genealogy of Indian migration to Brunei therefore emerges only in the post-Second World War period, when the Company recruited Indians to rehabilitate Brunei in the wake of the Japanese occupation of Borneo. Although official census reports for the 1950s recorded the Company's Indian labour force to range from 388 people in 1952, peaking at 744 in 1954, to 219 in 1959, the numbers do not correspond with the figures suggested to me by the Indians I interviewed. My respondents insisted that Indian workers in the oilfields ranged from 2,000–3,000 men, many of whom, they noted, were labourers brought to Brunei by private contractors for the Company. While these figures rest on memories of Brunei Indians and cannot be verified easily, it is clear that in the mid-1950s, Indians constituted a visible and significant alien resident community in Seria.

Historically, the consolidation of British colonial rule over India shifted the paths of Indian migration and the dispersion of Indians to overseas locations. Whereas for millennia Indian migration primarily followed trade routes and was often shaped by the extension of native kingdoms’ spheres of cultural and political influence or dominance to other parts of South and South East Asia, British colonial rule saw the systematic trafficking of human labour to overseas colonial destinations. Fiercely protective of its Indian labour, the British restricted its transfer to its colonies and then permitted it only to meet imperial exigencies for workers in these sites within the British empire. Indian diaspora formation until the end of the Second World War, therefore, is closely tied to British rule and colonial capitalism. The Indians who came to Brunei in the early twentieth century to work on the rubber plantations and in the Seria oilfield are clearly embedded in these movements of labour, although outside the system of indentured labour that framed Indian migration and work in overseas British plantations. The passing of the 1922 Indian Emigration Act, partly in response to Indian protests against the abuses of indentured labour, marked a tightening of colonial control of the emigration of unskilled workers as well as new oversight over the welfare of colonial subjects.Footnote ²² With the end of the system of indentured labour, British companies authorized Indian recruiters, or kanganis, to bring workers from India to the rubber plantations and the Seria oilfield in Brunei.Footnote ²³ The numbers of Indian workers employed in both the oilfield and plantations, however, remained low through the pre-war years. In his 1925 Report on the State of Brunei, British Resident E. E. F. Pretty, commenting on the shortage of local labour, noted: ‘The example of the Brunei United Plantations Limited, who were the pioneers in the movement to allow Tamil immigration into the state, has been followed by the British Malayan Petroleum Company Limited at Belait and both companies are highly satisfied with results and are sending kanganis to recruit from India direct.’Footnote ²⁴ The Company's efforts in these early years to employ Indian labour —which they continued during the 1940s and 1950s by engaging Indian contractors to supply the Company with unskilled, semiskilled, and skilled workers—clearly intersect with the histories of plantation labour recruitment and colonial rule.

Much of the scholarship on pre-First World War Indian migration and the Indian diaspora has focused on the Western hemisphere and on indentured labour histories of Indians—primarily those charted by the sugar, palm oil, and rubber economies of British colonies—in Fiji, the Caribbean, Mauritius, Ceylon, and Malaya.Footnote ²⁵ These studies are important in examining the histories of plantation work and the formation of ethnically and culturally distinctive ‘Indian’ communities in the diaspora and the ways in which a distant Indian homeland continues to serve as a site of origin in disaporic imaginaries. In the context of Indian migration to the Seria oilfield, these studies point to the temporality of indentured and free movements of unskilled labour within the British empire prior to the Second World War. Like those Indians who went as indentured labourers, the Indians who were brought to Brunei filled shortages for labour-intensive and physically demanding work in the Seria oilfield and rubber plantations. The controller of labour for Malaya in the British colonial office regulated the entry of Indians to Brunei. Hence, while indenture had been abolished, the institutions and structural processes of colonial migration remained. Moreover, as British subjects, these Indians continued to be defined by imperial imaginaries that historically had characterized them as workers of low social status in native society who were ‘racially’ suited to performing manual labour.Footnote ²⁶ One of my informants characterized these flows of labour as ‘coolie’ labour, since working conditions were poor and wages low. The 1931 annual report of British Resident T. F. Carey, for instance, reflects colonial assumptions that made Indian labour desirable. Carey observes that whereas the monthly living cost of Malay and Chinese workers was between $10 and $15, that of Indian workers was estimated at $9. Differential wages continued to be contingent on ethnic lines even in the post-war period. For instance, in the immediate aftermath of Japanese occupation, W. J. Peel's annual report for 1946 notes that in the Seria oilfield Chinese and Dayak labourers were paid $1.00 to $1.50 per day, whereas Malays and Indians were paid between 80 cents and $1.00 per day.Footnote ²⁷ The differential wage scale, while certainly reflective of colonial tactics of maintaining separate political interests within labour, was also a response to the shortage of local labour. Dayak and Chinese workers did not meet the growing demands for labour in the plantations and oilfield, making their labour more valuable. As one Brunei Indian explained to me, ‘Dayak workers were scarce. They were mostly domestic workers in their own community. . . Their community needed all their labour. Chinese were local Chinese. . . It was a question of availability. Indian labour was plenty in India and they were seeking work elsewhere. Indigenous labour was rare. These people were community-loving people. They didn't want to leave their community.’

While Brunei-Indian narratives therefore must be contextualized within the histories of Indian labour migration to British colonial sites around the world—particularly since Brunei reverted to being a British protectorate after its liberation from Japanese occupation—the post-war genealogies of Indian migration to the oil towns of Seria or Miri during the 1940s–1960s are also implicitly embedded and more productively explored in the twentieth-century economies of oil exploration and production in South East and West Asia.Footnote ²⁸ Oil migration in the twentieth century forged new kinds of travel, work, and settlement, for the most part because Indians were recruited to countries that denied them residency and political rights. Indians began to be employed in Iran (then Persia) in 1907 and in other West Asian gulf countries in the 1930s, when oil exploration was carried out primarily by British companies, with the exception of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, whose concessions had been obtained by the American companies Gulf and the Standard Oil Company of California; the Anglo-Persian Company and Gulf had a joint concession in Kuwait.Footnote ²⁹ These were new kinds of migrants who knew that they were temporary workers and whose repatriation was the responsibility of the oil companies. Workers therefore were keenly aware of their expatriate status and the inevitability of their return to India.Footnote ³⁰ Oil companies provided Indian workers with several weeks of holiday every few years (or every other year, depending on rank in the Company) thus preserving workers’ strong ties and loyalties to India, rather than to their host countries. Most workers therefore consciously invested in a future in India, building homes and buying land that would ensure a comfortable standard of living on their repatriation to India.

Oil migration also encompassed a more systematic recruitment of a diverse group of workers. In Borneo and West Asia, Indians served different sectors and needs of the Company. Unskilled workers were used to build roads and housing, as stevedores, and to perform other kinds of manual labour necessary to building an oil town and sustaining a large expatriate labour force. In West Asia, these sites emerged as Company towns with their own facilities and governance, much as Seria did out of the ‘jungles’ of Borneo. Skilled labour consisted variously of drivers, drillers, and hotel and hospital workers, while semi-skilled workers served as assistants to skilled workers. Artisans acquired skills through practical training and long service. Turners, fitters, masons, machinists in general, and carpenters were among those designated as artisans. These workers collectively constituted ‘labour’ and were distinguished from the staff who represented workers in the administrative, clerical, and technical departments of the oil company. The recruitment of Indians as staff reflected the availability of an English-educated class of Indians who could be trained to serve in the Company offices. Kernal Singh Sandhu points out that a significant number of English-speaking Indians and Jaffna Tamils came to Malaya in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, ‘initially it appears through Malayan government and private recruitment, assistance or encouragement and later of their own volition and under their own steam’. While these Indians served, among others, as office assistants, surveyors, teachers, and technicians, Sandhu notes that they were also ‘invaluable in dealing with [Indian] labour and in acting as links between them and their generally British, or English-speaking employers’.Footnote ³¹ Interestingly, in the flows of migration to oil towns in West Asia and Borneo, the Indians who came as staff, like those who came to Malaya, were predominantly South Indians. Goans, who were subjects of Portuguese colonial rule until 1961 when India annexed Goa, were also recruited in small numbers to these oil towns. However, although English-educated Indians also migrated to Malaya, the factors shaping their arrival in Malaya varied from those affecting Indians who came to Company towns. In Malaya informal networks especially lured English-educated Indians to work in different sectors of the colonial economy, whereas in West Asia, Brunei, and Sarawak, the oil companies and the colonial office strictly regulated the entry of Indian workers to the oil towns on the basis of the specific needs of Company offices.

Fred Halliday points out that ‘the most striking feature about the oil industry in non-industrialized countries has been its enclave character’ and that ‘oil made virtually no impact on the local economy since the companies established few or no linkages with it, government revenues excluded’.Footnote ³² The self-sufficient and autonomous centres that emerged as oil towns in West Asia and Borneo spatially and socially distanced the Indians who came to work here in the early years of oil exploration, production, and refining from local communities. For instance, A. Melamid notes that Abadan, the first oil town in West Asia, ‘developed almost concentrically around the refinery’ with clearly marked spaces for the administrative offices, clubs, stores, hospitals, and residential areas for workers.Footnote ³³ Thus, the geography of the oil town reflected the development of the oil industry and the concomitant growth of its residential population of expatriate and local workers. While scholarship on the migration of Indian workers in the 1910s–1950s to the oil towns in West Asia and Southeast Asia is limited, available resources reveal patterns of similarities between the recruitment, work, and living conditions of Indians in the oil towns of West Asia and Brunei, especially of workers in British-dominated multinational companies. Corporate paternalism in the oil company, following a model of welfare capitalism, micro-managed employees’ lives, and oil towns maintained racial and class segregation between labour grades, staff, and Asian and European expatriate workers. I. J. Seccombe and R. I. Lawless note that political agreements between the British government and oil companies and between oil companies and local governments determined the composition of the nationality of the workers.Footnote ³⁴ In West Asia, British subjects, of whom Indians were recruited as clerical or semi-skilled and skilled workers, dominated the oilfields in the early years of exploration and production. However, by the 1950s, as nationalist sentiments deepened, local governments began to exercise control over the number of expatriate workers entering their countries.Footnote ³⁵ Local workers replaced Indians during this period in Iran and, by the 1960s, in other oil towns in the Gulf.Footnote ³⁶ In Brunei, a similar pattern emerges. Indians were recruited soon after the discovery of petroleum in 1929, and their numbers peaked in the 1950s. In the 1960s, labour redundancies were identified and the significant repatriation of Indian workers began. By the 1970s, local Chinese, Malays, and Eurasians took over positions in the various departments and very few Indians remained in the Company's offices and labour force.

A tea-shop on the road to Seria: travelling localities

Lazarus George, a Malayali Christian from Kerala, arrived by ship in Brunei in 1951. He was not recruited by the British Malayan Petroleum Company but by Harrisons and Crosfield, a shipping firm that did business with the Company.Footnote ³⁷ George remembered vividly his first few days in Brunei when he accompanied his European manager to his new office in Brunei:

Lazarus George's delight on meeting a Malayali on his second day in Brunei set the stage for his entry into a new and foreign land. The alienation that he might have expected to experience in Brunei was mitigated, at least for the moment, by the comforting familiarity of a fellow Malayali in a tea-shop, a site naturalized and ubiquitous in the landscape of Kerala. As a place to pause on the way to somewhere, the tea-shop in Kerala has traditionally hosted an improvised community; this is still the case today. At the tea-shop strangers and local residents meet, talk about the mundane and the unusual, read the newspaper aloud, and drink tea as they watch people and traffic on the road. Often a makeshift structure on the corner of a crossroad, the tea-shop is a place in-transit where news is exchanged and goods sold. For someone travelling down the road, the tea-shop is a place to stop to ask for directions and information about a local site. In this sense, the tea-shop serves as a repository of local knowledge, representing what Lucy Lippard has called ‘the lure of the local’.Footnote ³⁹ It is an easily recognizable site that provides a provisional sense of intimacy with the local. Lippard notes that ‘inherent in the local is the concept of place’, and that ‘place is where we stand to look around at landscape or look out to the (less familiar) “view”’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus, in George's narrative of arrival in Brunei, the ‘Malayali’ tea-shop transposed on an unfamiliar landscape became a point of reference. As a travelling site on the way to Seria, the tea-shop provided George with a place of entry into the local. It was also a position from which, situated tentatively, George could acquaint himself with the context of the local, giving him a sense of place as well as of the possibilities of community in Seria.

Shiva Natarajan also recounted meeting a Malayali at the ‘end of the Tutong river’ who had ‘migrated long before the War’:

In this article, the unexpected appearance of a Malayali in a tea-shop in Lazarus George's story of travel and beginnings and Siva Natarajan's meeting of a Malayali who lived among the Iban on the fringes of the jungle serve to frame the narrative agency and discursive practices of Brunei Indians. The article positions the Malayali as an extant figure in the Brunei frontier, where the tea-shop that occupies the side of the road is a crucial link between Baram, the ‘undeveloped’ Borneo, and Seria, the frontier oil town. By 1951, the year of George's arrival in Brunei, the road to Seria was ‘developed’, and the presence of the Malayali tea-shop owner signals the agency of Indians, particularly Malayalis, in the transformation of Seria into a site of work and habitation. The crossing to the ‘Seria side’, dependent on the ebbing tide and the vagaries of nature, marks the unstable and shifting border between Baram and Seria. In many of the narratives of Brunei Indians, this crossing is recollected with humour, emphasizing the spirit of adventure that marked their negotiations of the improvised conditions that confronted them. T. S. Nair, for instance, recollected,

The kajang, or thatched-roof houses, to which Indians were assigned when they first arrived in Brunei in the 1940s and 1950s indicate the expedient ways in which employees were housed in ‘native’ dwellings by the Company and the period of rehabilitation after the war.Footnote ⁴¹ However, George's pragmatic acknowledgment of the racial codes that signified his relationship with his European manager alerts us to the colonial economies that shape George’s, and other Indians’, travel and arrival in Brunei. Whereas the European manager stayed at a guesthouse, George was left to find accommodation in the local community. Thus, while Lazarus George might assert the presence of Malayalis in Brunei and remember his story through narratives of modernity, the colonial circumstances that enabled him to travel and live in Brunei cannot be ignored.

The Indians who came to Brunei in the 1940s and 1950s were recruited by the British Malayan Petroleum Company to rehabilitate the country after its oilfields were destroyed in 1945 by the departing Japanese army.Footnote ⁴² Brunei had come under Japanese occupation in December 1941, along with the neighbouring territories of North Borneo (now Sabah), Sarawak, the island of Labuan, and Dutch Kalimantan. While North Borneo, Sarawak, and Labuan officially became British colonies after the Second World War, Brunei reverted to being a British protectorate. The post-war rehabilitation of Brunei was principally aimed at resuscitating the oilfields and building the infrastructure to develop and expand oil exploration. Most of the Indians recruited to come to Seria were labourers who formed the drilling crews, stevedored, built the roads, and engaged in construction work. A smaller number of Indians—ranging from 500 to 700 men in the 1950s and early 1960s—came to staff the administrative offices or were brought as trainees in petroleum reservoir engineering and production.Footnote ⁴³ The Brunei Indians on whose stories this article is based were non-labourers who constituted the ‘regional staff’ and who, unlike labourers, worked closely with Europeans, Eurasians, local Chinese, and Malays and were acutely aware of the protocols of race and class that dictated their work and social spaces. ‘We were babus,’ said one of my informants, revealing a critical understanding of his place in a British protectorate. As men trained by the British and who historically had provided the British with the manpower to staff their colonial administrations, Indians in Brunei—although citizens of a free country—were under no illusion about their status in a British protectorate. Loyal to the Company and to their European bosses, Brunei Indians spoke of the glass ceiling that held them back from positions reserved for Europeans and of the segregated social worlds they inhabited. Raghavan Menon wryly noted, ‘Salary increases, but status can't go up.’ Menon pointed out that he got ‘a number of promotions. Then it came to a certain stage and I was stuck. I cannot go any further because being an Asian, Indian . . . certain jobs were more or less reserved for white people.’ However, Brunei Indians’ pragmatism about these unequal relations allows them to acknowledge their racialized positions in the Company while, in a reflexive gesture, their narratives pose the instrumentality of their work in these places in the transformation of a part of the Borneo ‘jungle’ into a rich and modern state. As Gopal Kymal explained, ‘We were very obedient people to the Company, you know . . . Everybody is hardworking. There is no fun there. Working conditions were very strict. We were all working very hard. Sincere workers. Very good conditions. Very disciplined working conditions.’

The jungle as a non-place

The stories of the Brunei-Indian men that I recorded, consist of narratives of travel-in-work and travelling work. Hence, the routes of work and the spaces traversed for work, or made possible by work, are significant in delineating an imaginative geography of Borneo that brings into focus the transformative role of Indian labour in the making of Brunei. Apart from Seria, the oil town of Miri in Sarawak and Brunei Town—Brunei's capital, which lies to the north of Seria—are the only other locations that serve as notable but undeveloped urban sites in Brunei-Indian narratives. Although Miri is the Company's first oil town, in Brunei-Indian narratives it does not emerge as a space that competes with Seria since its oil wealth and significance as a Company town are rarely remarked upon by Brunei Indians.Footnote ⁴⁴ Instead, Miri serves as a frontier post, a place to disembark and travel through on the way to Seria. Brunei Town is a local Malay site, perceived not so much as a frontier town but a town that holds within it the cultural and social values and institutions that have come to define Brunei as a Malay Islamic State.Footnote ⁴⁵ This geography of naming in Brunei-Indian narratives appears in contrast to the absence of place elsewhere in Brunei, and indeed Borneo. Hence, the rest of Borneo is a historical space, a non-place that is important in Brunei-Indian narratives as the jungle that looms around them and shapes their pioneering travel and work. Interestingly, although Indians spoke of disembarking in the ‘middle of the sea’, the sea, unlike the jungle, is not a non-place. Offshore drilling in the 1950s, and the discovery of the South West Ampa field in 1963 and Fairley field in 1969, ensure that the sea became an integral part of the Brunei Indians’ worksite. Moreover, the Seria field came into existence in 1929 when the Asiatic Petroleum Company Ltd (the pre-cursor to the British Malayan Petroleum Company) drilled for oil on the beach, thus tapping into the geography of land and sea. The town of Seria was built out of the swamp and marsh, which were filled with sand, metaphorically staging the sea as a constituent agent in the formation of Seria. In Brunei-Indian narratives, therefore, the sea is not a space to be subdued or feared but a place to be surveyed and exploited for oil and natural gas reserves, resources that would build and empower the Company and the state. Hence, in Brunei-Indian narratives, the frontier faces not the sea but the unmapped space of the jungle.

Greg Dening, whose works have posed islands and beaches as metaphors of encounter between outsiders and the indigenous peoples of the Pacific, proposes that ‘history is more likely to be born on beaches, marginal spaces between land and sea’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Rather than simply places of landing, Dening sees beaches as sites of theatre since anyone who crosses the beach, ‘from land to sea and from sea to land, either way . . . is left a foreigner and an outsider’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Dramas of encounter on the beach therefore serve to open the discursive possibilities of new histories. Contextualized thus, beaches are midway locations in Brunei-Indians’ travelling stories and, metaphorically, the place from which Brunei is narrated. Seria is founded on the beach when petroleum was discovered in 1929 and it became ‘a place’ along the routes of Brunei Indians’ travel. The discursive tropes of Brunei Indians’ early years in Seria mimic European accounts of voyaging and exploration across the uncharted Pacific. Hence Dening's characterization of early European voyagers resonates with Indians who journeyed to Brunei: ‘Because they came on ships, each one of them came divorced from the ordinary circumstances of their lives . . . They brought their ordinary worlds in their heads, in their values and perceptions, in their language and their judgements; but they lived extraordinary lives on their ships, on their beaches, in their mission stations, in their forts.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Leaving their insular and parochial worlds in India, Brunei Indians boarded ships in Madras for their three-week long voyage to Brunei. For most, it was their first journey away from home and their first voyage. On boarding the ship, they entered a new social world, meeting fellow Malayalis as well as Indians from other parts of the country. While some of the women recounted being very seasick (rather than homesick), most Brunei Indians looked back at their shipboard experience as their initiation into a cosmopolitan sensibility and a place that enabled them to forge bonds of friendship and community with Brunei Indians—those returning to Brunei or beginning new lives in Brunei. Mrs Raja, who in 1958 travelled with her husband on the steamship the State of Madras, recalled: ‘I came from the countryside. Do we know anything? We didn't know anything. . . we had learned [English] in school. But speaking is different. So [my husband] began to teach me on the ship.’ The emphasis in Brunei Indians’ narratives on learning to speak English is noteworthy since these Indians knew the language and could understand it, yet they constituted fluency of speech and ‘correct’ pronunciation as markers of an urbanity that they acquired only through their travels and time in a British protectorate.

Mrs Raja's introduction to this new life on board the State of Madras is emblematic of the importance of ships in Brunei Indians’ stories. The ship, Paul Gilroy points out in his study of the black Atlantic, is ‘a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion’.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is also a contact zone.Footnote ⁵⁰ Christina Burr's use of the ‘contact zone’ to describe the oilfields where Canadian drillers were absorbed into imperialist protocols of race, class, and gender is pertinent to understanding the ways in which Brunei Indians in Seria were located in colonial formations.Footnote ⁵¹ However, I would argue that Brunei Indians were first introduced to the contact zone on board the ships on which they travelled to Seria. As Mary Pratt explains, ‘“contact zone” is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect’.Footnote ⁵² The ‘contact zone’ therefore emphasizes the drama of encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans and the ‘copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices’ forged through this encounter.Footnote ⁵³ Mrs Ramachandran Nair emphasized, for instance, her initiation into a new world when she came aboard the Rajula. ‘I enjoyed the trip. Europeans, Tamilians. Mostly all from India. From Singapore, Chinese, Malays, Europeans [came aboard]. . . I’m from the village. Just say a few words. . . I liked them. They’re very friendly.’ While the ship provided a transitory contact zone for Indians, it was an important site that situated them within the colonial contexts of the Company's rule. Race marked their place and their relations with European passengers, while on board ships Indians came into contact with divergent class, caste, religious, and regional identities among the Indians, making the contact zone a place where not only imperial but also ‘native’ systems of meaning were negotiated. Ramachandran Nair, for instance, pointed out that Europeans and Indians were segregated, although he attributed it to class differences. ‘That is always separated. If you want to be with Europeans, first class. You can go there. Then second class. Deck passengers—labourers. . . That is all the variation of the fares.’ Often Brunei Indians said they never saw Europeans but presumed there must have been some on board. As Gopal Kymal stated, ‘Europeans? We didn't know anyone. They may be in first class. We didn't go there.’

In contrast to air travel, ships involve a lengthier travel time and a keen sense of crossing space in real time. For Brunei Indians, the first voyage enabled them to establish friendships and a sense of camaraderie with fellow Indians that would be reaffirmed as they built an Indian community in Seria. Unlike travellers who meet on ships and strike up provisional acquaintanceships or friendships, Brunei Indians invested in these new relations knowing that these Indians were not merely fellow passengers but people to whom they would be tied through work and the expatriate social life in Seria. Certainly, in their retrospective perspectives from their homes in India today, Brunei Indians see these meetings on board ship as testimonies to the special and lasting relations they forged—despite cultural, linguistic, religious, caste, or parochial differences—during their passage to Seria. For Indians who travelled on ships to Brunei in the 1940s and 1950s, these voyages represented their inscription into the networks of colonial capitalism as well as their negotiation of colonial modernity. Indrepal Grewal observes how, in the nineteenth century, new means of travel informed new forms of colonial employment for middle-class Indians. She points out that while ‘travel became a method through which education and certain forms of agency could be acquired, it was complicated both by imperial notions of travel within which Indians were seen as being liberated by European modernity constructed through notions of education and progress, and by the Indian traveler's desire to take advantage of these discourses’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Although Indians sailed to Brunei as citizens of free India, the moment they boarded ships to Seria as employees of the British Malayan Petroleum Company they came under the Company's sphere of control. Hence the cosmopolitism—the simultaneous engagement of different social worlds within a global milieu—they were introduced to on ships was shaped by colonial relations and the Company's paternalism. However, Indians were self-conscious consumers of a modernity that they saw as both being progressive and a means of reimagining themselves as cosmopolitan subjects who came to see their travel as extraordinary and themselves as agents of history and modernity.Footnote ⁵⁵

This colonial modernity that inflects Brunei-Indian narratives of travel and arrival rests on the identification of Borneo as a non-place. I use the term ‘non-place’ to denote a historical spaceFootnote ⁵⁶ outside the discourses of modernity rather than signifying either ‘an erosion of place’ or what Edward Casey terms ‘no-place-at-all’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Casey's distinction between ‘place [which] situates’ and ‘no-place’ which ‘connotes the radical absence of place of any kind’ or an ‘utter void’ focuses attention on the relationship between location (or located-ness) and place.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is this lack of situatedness, rather than ‘no-place’, to which I attribute the term ‘non-place’. In Brunei Indians’ narratives, their travel to Seria, a remote place in South East Asia, is discursively constituted as a passage to a place on the edges of the jungle. In identifying the jungle as a non-place, Brunei Indians inscribe it not only outside the temporality of colonial modernity but also outside the territoriality of place, and hence also the state. Thus, when Brunei Indians land in Miri, and make the journey through the jungle, the darkness of the interior space of Borneo is interrupted only by the occasional bursts of fire in the sky.

The imagery of the darkness of the jungle and the fire of industry serves to juxtapose two dominant discourses that shape Brunei Indians’ narration of Brunei. The jungle represents the challenge posed to modern technologies of industry in transforming an unmapped space into a productive place that can be incorporated into the circuits of global capital, while the fire serves to obscure from view the peoples who inhabit the jungle and whose histories narrate places ‘in’ the jungle. Some of the Brunei-Indian men I interviewed spoke of trips they had made into the jungle, but none of the Indian women ventured beyond the frontier towns. V. R. Menon recounted a trip that he had made to check on Company stock held in a remote location on the border between North Borneo (Sabah) and Indonesia:

In V. R. Menon's account, the danger that he encounters in the jungle is from rebels who inhabit the fringes of modernity and are products of competing and intersecting local and state discourses, and whose violent resistance to the colonial state and local centres of power and authority situates them in the jungle. Clearly, for V. R. Menon, the sense of danger that marks the jungle is a modern phenomenon, one that is located in the struggle over modernity rather than one that relies on popular colonial representations of the headhunting indigenous peoples of Borneo. Indians acknowledged the existence of Dayaks as the aboriginal peoples of Borneo, but they reproduced colonial tropes of paternalism and negation in their erasing of indigenous agency and, indeed, of the visibility of indigenous peoples in the narration of Brunei.Footnote ⁵⁹ Interestingly, although Brunei Indians spoke of the dangers that lurked in the jungle in the form of headhunters and rebel strongholds, they did not perceive the jungle to be the heart of darkness delineated in European travelogues.Footnote ⁶⁰ Instead, they spoke of their trips as adventures into a ‘primitive’ world, trips that also served to signify their journey from India, a place of civilization, to Borneo. K. P. Narayanan, who arrived in Seria in 1953, recounted: ‘We were ready to go at that time with the light of adventure in the eyes. We would like to see new places, have experiences. . . So with that in view we came to a place where we were told Dayaks were there, the original inhabitants who were the headhunters they were believed (sic).’ Brunei Indians clearly identified Dayaks as ‘the original inhabitants’ of Borneo but they were much more ambiguous about the presence of headhunters. They acknowledged European legends of Borneo's headhunters but since they personally had no occasion to verify these stories, Brunei Indians tended to defer such representations to myth and primeval pasts. Instead, what is striking about their descriptions of the Dayaks is the emphasis on the simplicity of Dayak lives and their innocence. K. P. Narayanan, for instance, fondly described his one-day stay with Dayaks in a longhouse thus:

In seeing Dayaks as non-threatening, Brunei-Indian narratives mirrored a dominant Christian missionary discourse that emphasized the potential for indigenous peoples to be civilized and transformed into Christian workers who could then enter colonial modernity.Footnote ⁶¹ Unlike Malays, the Dayaks were untouched by civilization and therefore unsullied by the corruptions of modernity. Hence their purported simplicity and innocence not only scripted them as noble savages but also endowed them with redemptive possibilities. As Shiva Natarajan declared, ‘Nice fellows. I like the Iban very much. Very hardworking. Very trustworthy . . .You can't find such simple people.’

While this benevolent paternalism marked Brunei-Indian descriptions of the Dayaks in the jungle, Brunei Indians acknowledged some friendships or acquaintanceships they had with Dayaks who worked for the Company. In particular, some of the women spoke of being friends with the wives of Dayak employees and identified them with the local society. They often alluded to the Dayak women when they wanted to emphasize the diverse ethnic and national origins of their friends, a community made possible by their life in a Company town rather than in Brunei. Brunei Indians also saw Malays as belonging to Borneo but located them outside the jungle. They were not seen as the indigenous people of the land but as people who over the centuries had become naturalized inhabitants of Borneo and come to dominate the local society. Some Brunei Indians differentiated between Brunei Malays and Indonesians, the latter, according to one of my informants, being a ‘bit more hardworking’. Brunei Indians spoke of Malays as having neither the intellectual capital nor the ambition necessary to be good workers, and many of them characterized Malays as being an easy-going people with simple needs. ‘They prefer to be lazy,’ said K. P. Narayanan of the local Malays, while Ramachandran Nair declared, ‘they’re not skilled labourers. The skilled labourers are the Dayaks.’ Syed Alatas's study of the ‘myth of the lazy native’ reveals how these images are consonant with imperial writings on Malays in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Alatas points out that the refusal of Malays to work on plantations was construed by the British as denoting their inherent laziness and inability to perform continuous work.Footnote ⁶² The unreliability of Malay labour in the colonies forced the British to turn to Indian labour for their plantations in Malaysia and the oilfields of Borneo. Brunei Indians recognize their presence in Seria as being informed by these colonial imperatives but also impute that Malays themselves acknowledged their purported lack of industry and knowledge. Thus Mr Jayaram observed: ‘They are very friendly. The people are not educated. So when we go there, we are like the kerani. They call [us] “Kerani! Kerani!” That means we are of a higher position in the office and everywhere. So they always think they are the bottom people. . . They give more respect to us, you know.’Footnote ⁶³

In perceiving the jungle as a non-place and most of Brunei as being outside the Company's modernizing project, Brunei Indians discursively constituted their site of work and dwelling within the frameworks of both Borneo and India. Their sense of culture as the defining trope of a civilized state was derived from an acute sense of India as an ancient realm with rich and sophisticated intellectual traditions. Thus, while they might have seen modernity as linked to the European colonial project, they perceived culture as something that they possessed simply by being Indians. K. P. Narayanan, for instance, noted that in contrast to Indians, ‘Malays have not much of a literature. Even the script was in Urdu; it had no grammar. I mean nothing deep-rooted.’ Echoing these sentiments, Mrs Raja said that Malay ‘has no grammar. It just has some words that you have to say.’ Brunei, according to K. P. Narayanan, ‘had no charm of its own. . . There was no culture, no civilization, there is no background if you look at [it].’ Most Brunei Indians perceived Brunei to have no recorded history and no material culture that reflected cosmopolitan histories. Indeed, many believed the Brunei Sultanate to have been an insignificant fiefdom or one that the British had put in place, even invented. Brunei Indians showed very little familiarity with the lineage of the Sultanate or of the recorded accounts of Brunei's power and influence in the region going back to the seventh century. This erasing of the histories of Brunei enables Brunei Indians to script their arrival in Seria as agents of history who not only harness the natural resources of Seria but also narrate Brunei into modernity.

Fire in the jungle: domesticating the frontier oil town

The most vivid memories of Brunei Indians’ arrival in Borneo centre around their first glimpse of the jungle. Perceived as an unmapped and inhospitable space, the dense foliage and darkness of their immediate environment served to contextualize their road journey to Seria. The ships on which they had voyaged were anchored in ‘the middle of the sea’, and the Brunei Indians were ferried in small boats to the ports of Miri, which one Brunei Indian referred to as a ‘so-called port’, or Lutong in Sarawak. One woman recollected her fear of getting into ‘baskets’ that were lowered by a crane from the ship into the boats that came alongside. Most Brunei Indians were unimpressed by the ports, which they said were merely places to land ashore rather than thriving and bustling shipping and trading centres. As Mrs Pillai explained, ‘There was nothing there.’ From these ports in Sarawak, Brunei Indians were transported to Seria. ‘They put everyone in a lorry. Those days you didn't see a light. All you see is jungle . . . and [then] fire; gas being burned in big flarestacks. On both sides of the road is the jungle and all you see is fire.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Mrs Pillai's apocalyptic image of flames shooting into the sky in the otherwise impenetrable darkness on both sides of the road, shapes the context of the Brunei Indians’ arrival in Borneo. It brings into view the Company's dramatic confrontation with the jungle and the role of Brunei Indians in the conquest of this territory. Yet, while the fire is roaring and brilliant, asserting the forces of modern industry, it is also blinding. In the dark shadows of the jungle are lives and histories unseen by Brunei Indians who, dazzled by the brilliant spectacle, and fearful of the unknown, insert themselves into the Company's narratives of colonial modernity.

The moment of arrival for most Brunei Indians was defined by their journey through the jungle to Seria, the Company's frontier outpost in the late 1940s and throughout the mid-1950s. They described the conditions that confronted them as being ‘primitive’. The men spoke of having to harvest rainwater in drums in the early years since potable water was in short supply. T. S. Nair described his experience soon after he arrived in Seria in 1947: ‘From India we had brought white towels. The day I landed I went for a bath and I saw my towel turn pink. That was the quality of water they were supplying. For drinking and cooking, we gather rainwater . . . For bathing we used water pumped from the river. That is muddy water.’ The kajang houses that lodged the Indians were across the road from the jungle where, Mrs Nambesan noted, ‘monkeys were jumping’. T. S. Nair recalled how, in the early days, there were no distinguishing landmarks. ‘Brunei was a jungle. One day about 6 pm. I went to the shop and bought something. But I lost direction. Because it was all jungle only. Instead of going north, I went south. Then somehow or the other [I] tried to get home. Jungle all around. Only some cleared patches. Some houses and some shops.’ Brunei Indians perceived these circumstances as defining their place in the transformation of the jungle that loomed around them into an affluent state. Their adaptation to the frontier conditions emphasized their collective spirit of adventure and resilience. The jungle served as a tabula rasa on which colonial modernity inscribed the technologies of statehood and culture.

In locating themselves on the outposts of the jungle, Brunei Indians’ narratives of community and capital accumulation intersect with the fortunes of the Company and the rise of the modern state of Brunei. By the mid- and late 1950s, Seria was already a different space. Many of the women I interviewed arrived in Seria during this transitional period, and they marked their arrival in Brunei as part of a different phase of settlement. Mrs Jayaram, for instance, declared, ‘When I married and went . . . everything [was] civilized and we got the commodes and new cottages and all.’ In equating civilization with a certain level of material wellbeing, Mrs Jayaram reproduces the colonial logic of settlement and progress. Relying on tropes of domesticity, she highlights the new housing facilities provided by the Company which made her life much more comfortable in Brunei. Mrs Raja, commenting on her arrival in Seria, noted that by the time she got there, ‘everything was normal’. This sense of normality, however, is perceived in juxtaposition with their husbands’ stories of arrival and adaptation in the frontier oil town. The wives of those men who arrived in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War particularly referred to the hardships and scarcities their husbands faced. One woman noted that the men's diet consisted only of rice, potato, and dried fish since apparently nothing else was available in Brunei. The commodities that the women took for granted as necessities—such as a variety of foods and potable water—were indexes of a standard of living that Brunei (and the British Malayan Petroleum Company) in the mid- to late 1940s could not provide its Indian workforce. For the women, such scarcity marked the innate conditions of life in Borneo prior to the civilizing impact of Indian labour and the Company's capital, rather than the effects of the Japanese occupation of Borneo and the destruction of markets and towns by Allied bombing.Footnote ⁶⁵

The arrival of a significant number of Indian women in Seria in the mid- and late 1950s, as scripted in Brunei Indians’ narratives, is reminiscent of the coming of white women to European colonies.Footnote ⁶⁶ Ann Stoler points out that in the colonies the ‘ratios of men to women followed from how sexuality was managed and how racial categories were produced rather than the other way round’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Poor white women, especially single women, were restricted from migrating to the colonies, but the entry of ‘respectable’ white women into the colonies signalled a critical shift in the imperatives of colonial rule. Stoler notes that ‘the arrival of [white] women usually occurred in conjunction with some immediately planned stabilization of colonial rule’. However, Stoler also cautions that ‘the term stabilization is ambiguous; it may express either a securing of empire or a response to imperial vulnerability’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the colonies, white women carried with them the imperial burden of assuring racial purity and the bounded spaces of colonial society.Footnote ⁶⁹ The ideology of modern domesticity, brought from Europe to the colonies, entitled white women to an imperial hauteur that asserted their distance from ‘the natives’ while simultaneously affirming an exclusive white community.Footnote ⁷⁰ Hence, white women arrived in the colony after it had been secured through conquest and when anxieties over unfettered social and sexual relations between Europeans and their colonial subjects became acute.Footnote ⁷¹ The iconography of imperial rule therefore deployed white women as custodians of culture whose vigilance over the colonial home domesticated white men and their social worlds.Footnote ⁷²

In Seria, European women preceded Indian women, arriving in the oil town by the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Indian women's perception of a new phase of Brunei's settlement and development must therefore be located vis-à-vis the different realities, inscribed by race, confronting European and Indian women. When Indian women came to Brunei, Seria was already strictly segregated, with European families occupying housing set aside for the Company's ‘senior staff’.Footnote ⁷³ In this sense, white society in Seria was stablilized prior to the arrival of Indian women. Moreover, the spatial order of the bourgeois home and its protocols of domesticity were now inscribed into the Company's personnel policies for non-white employees whose work and personal lives were under Company surveillance. Enakshi Dua, in her study of the migration of Indian women to Canada in the early twentieth century, points out that the formation of ethnic communities was ‘seen as a means of protecting and segregating white women from Asian men’, ensuring the regulation of interracial sexual relations from within the ethnic communities.Footnote ⁷⁴ Dua's study is useful here in contextualizing the migration of Indian women after the arrival of European women in Seria. During the mid-1950s, many of the Indian men who went to India on leave entered into arranged marriages with women from within their own communities.Footnote ⁷⁵ Most of these newlywed women arrived in Brunei with their husbands when they returned to work or were escorted to Brunei by friends or acquaintances of their husbands. Their entry into Brunei as wives of Indian workers was regulated by the state of Brunei.

It is important to note here that this migration of Indian women to Seria for the most part was limited to the wives of the Company's Indian staff who were part of the non-labour workforce. Hence the class bias in the Company's endorsement of Indian women's migration coincides with the embourgeoisement of the Indian community in Seria. Employers, such as the British Malayan Petroleum Company or Harrison and Crosfields, had to provide the appropriate documentation to authorize the entry of foreign nationals into Brunei. Most of the Indian women who arrived as wives were authorized entry into Brunei by the Company, and only staff and labourers of a high rank could bring their families. Gopal Kymal noted, ‘Some people were not allowed to bring their family because only after a certain grade you are allowed to bring your family. Otherwise you can't control your family expenditure.’ Hence, while the men might have desired to bring their wives to Brunei, it was the agency and will of the Company that made their arrival possible. By the mid-1950s, the material conditions deemed necessary for a prospective family life were provided by the Company. Whereas earlier the men had been housed in ‘bachelor’ accommodations, married men were now entitled to move into newly built independent housing units. Furthermore, the rehabilitation of Brunei, especially of the Seria oilfield, in the wake of the Japanese denial operation and Allied bombing was complete by the time most of these Indian women came to Brunei. Indeed, many of the Indian labourers recruited to rehabilitate Brunei after the war became ‘redundant’ when their labour was no longer needed and, beginning in 1957, a significant number of labourers began to be repatriated to India. One of the largest ‘redundancy’ repatriations of labourers and staff occurred between 1961 and 1962, signalling the completion of a phase of reconstruction and development in Seria.

The arrival of a significant number of Indian wives in the mid- and late 1950s therefore coincides with this stabilization of the work site as well as the reassertion of British ‘colonial’ rule in Brunei.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus, the perception of normality in Seria in the mid-1950s that Indian women alluded to is framed by the stories of their husbands’ and other Indian men's arrival and work, while also intersecting with colonial discourses of modernity and progress. In Brunei-Indian narratives, the period between the late 1940s and mid-1950s was characterized as a time when the Indian community was a ‘bachelor’ society. Mr Abraham spoke of the ‘restricted life’ of bachelors in those early years of settlement. Work rather than community shaped their everyday lives and the men spoke of leaving work in the evening to meet at the Shell Recreation Club, the club assigned for regional staff, which was often referred to as the ‘Asiatic’ club, to play tennis or cards and drink beer. ‘Drinking was a pastime,’ said K. P. Narayanan to depict what he deemed were the rather uninteresting, even purposeless, lives that they led outside the workplace. Although all the Indian men I interviewed spoke of the camaraderie they shared as bachelors, the sense of an Indian community that was part of the local society emerges only after the arrival of women and the birth of Indian children in Seria. In Brunei-Indian narratives, this growth and strengthening of the Indian community are not only linked to the development of the urban landscape of Seria but also to the domestication of the frontier oil town. Indeed, Brunei as a site of community formation emerges distinctly during this phase of migration and settlement as Seria becomes a more meaningful place, rather than a historical space encountered along the routes of work and travel of Indian men.

Here, Paul Carter's studies of explorer narratives of travel along the coasts of Australia is useful in distinguishing between the Brunei in which the first Indian workers arrived after its liberation from Japanese occupation and the Brunei that Indian women entered beginning in the mid-1950s. Carter points out that routes, rather than roots, enable the spatial constitution of Australia and that ‘we see what the firstcomers did not see: a place, not a historical space’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This gap between the spatial constitution of an unnamed continent and that of a place with named points of reference is useful in understanding the agency of place-making in Brunei-Indian narratives. Indian women ‘arrive’ in Brunei only when they enter Seria. Their route to Seria takes them from a ship moored in the middle of the sea, then across the Baram river, and through the jungle, providing a glimpse of the historical space that Seria used to occupy, and continues to be surrounded by, before Indian labour transformed it into a site of work and dwelling. For the Indian men who arrived in Brunei in the 1940s in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese occupation, Seria is an outpost, a point of reference in an otherwise indistinguishable terrain, from which Borneo, rather than Brunei, may be explored. The distinction between references to Borneo and Brunei rests on different spatial and temporal conceptions of place. In Brunei-Indian narratives, the island of Borneo figures as an unmapped and prehistoric space, while Brunei is fixed in time and space only when it is inscribed into narratives of modernity and statehood. As Carter points out, ‘the rhetorical significance of the frontier is that it empties the beyond of any cultural significance even before it is subdued’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Hence, in the early 1950s, Brunei Indians travel through the jungle and locate themselves in Seria, the frontier town, since Brunei has yet to be narrated. The perceived absence of the state makes the Company the principle architect of Brunei's development, and the origin of the modern state, then, is rooted in Seria.

Rebellion! Witnessing history

On 8 December 1962, the military wing of the Partai Ra’ayat Brunei (People's Party), under the leadership of A. M. Azahari, rose in rebellion across Brunei. In the early hours of the morning, the sultan's palace and the police station in Brunei Town had come under attack and the power station had been captured.Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet Indians in Seria had no inkling of the rebellion until well into the late morning when the men at work were asked to return home immediately.

Mr Jayaram, however, got information a little earlier than the others when a local boy who was working with him told him he should go home. A few of the Indians did not make it home since they, along with some European and Chinese workers, were captured by the rebels and used as human shields to attack the Panaga Police Station in Seria.

Brunei Indians’ accounts of the rebellion situate them at the centre of the crisis since they saw themselves both as victims who suffered and experienced the event and as witnesses of a critical moment in the history of modern Brunei. During the three days of siege, rumour and hushed speculation about the activities outside their homes occasionally heightened their sense of danger. Indians noted that they were afraid to drink the water since they had heard a rumour that the town's water had been poisoned. Some of the Indian families got together in homes away from the road where they might be less likely to be shot at. For the most part, Indians did not take the rebellion seriously until their own homes came under fire and they learned that Indians were being held hostage. For Brunei Indians, the days of the short-lived rebellion were moments of drama. Mrs Nambesan, described the rebellion thus:

Mrs Ramachandran Nair was at home when ‘after nine o’clock, the Chinese lady next door came and said, “You go inside because some trouble is going on.” Then only we heard from the radio . . . saw the planes . . . the Gurkhas. So many dead bodies. The locals.’ Mrs Ramachandran Nair believed that there was a lot of local Malay support for the rebels, and Gopal Kymal observed that ‘local people and Azahari's people’ had rounded up hostages in front of his house and ‘from here they were speaking to the police station’.

Selina Thomas, a Brunei Indian who worked as a nurse in the Company's hospital in Kuala Belait recalled how the hospital and the hostel close-by that housed the nurses came under fire. The hospital was under siege since bullets from both the rebels and the police whizzed over its roof, and they were unable to move the patients. The ambulance was allowed to bring in casualties and one injured rebel was brought to the hospital. ‘We were so frightened. Curfew was proclaimed. People were shooting around our hostel, hospital . . . My god! No bath! No water . . . Porridge in the morning, porridge in the afternoon, and porridge in the evening.’

Brunei Indians’ recollections of the rebellion are marked by humour and emphasize the short-lived nature of the uprising. They also provide insights into the double-consciousness of Brunei Indians who, although loyal to the Company, indicate an understanding of the sentiments behind the uprising. As expatriates, their covert sympathy for the rebel cause is informed by their own colonial subjectivity in British India and their keen grasp of the realities of life in a British protectorate and, albeit an apparently benevolent monarchy, a Sultanate. Moreover, an implicit critique of the British support of the Sultanate also marks their double-consciousness.

The Brunei Indians I interviewed gave conflicting accounts of rebel leader Azahari's loyalties. Selina Thomas called him ‘the self-styled prime minister of Kalimantan Utara’. Most were uncertain about the background to the rebellion; some thought that Azahari might have been supported by Indonesia, while a few of the Indian women appeared to think that Malaysia had been involved in the event. Recollecting the event over 40 years later, the incomplete narratives of Brunei Indians are unsurprising. Nonetheless, their accounts are important, since Brunei Indians observed that Azahari had widespread local Malay support. They pointed out that no Malays were taken hostage and that the local population appeared to have had some prior knowledge about the rebellion. Indeed, Brunei Indians perceive the rebellion as a populist uprising and locate it within the context of a critical period of Brunei's modernization when the political future and the fate of Brunei and its peoples were being debated.Footnote ⁸⁰ In September 1959, after two years of discussions, Brunei promulgated a new constitution that ended the 1906 British residency agreement and gave the Sultan control over its internal affairs. Brunei Indians, although rather sceptical of the shift in power, followed the events closely since they felt that they had played a role in the process and held the local Malay populace in affectionate regard. V. R. Menon pointed out that as the president of the Indian Association he had been ‘an honoured member’ in the local Malay society and had served as ‘a delegation member’ who represented Brunei's Indian community to the Sultan's council during the framing of the constitution of the Brunei government. Thus, Brunei Indians felt that although they were ineligible for citizenship, they had played an important role in the founding of a new constitution that established an executive and legislative council.Footnote ⁸¹ In 1961, Tunku Abdul Rahman, the prime minister of the Malaysian Federation, proposed the incorporation of North Borneo, Sarawak, and Brunei into the Malaysian Federation, which was opposed by Indonesia and the Philippines. At the time, Brunei's Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin appeared to be receptive to the idea. Azahari, whom the Sultan nominated in 1961 to serve on the newly formed legislative council, and who resigned the following year to protest the council's decision to enter into negotiations with Malaysia, was a fervent advocate of the sovereignty of the Brunei Sultanate over North Borneo and Sarawak. Hence he advocated ‘a united North Kalimantan’ outside the Malaysian Federation.Footnote ⁸² In the 1962 district council elections, Azahari's People's Party party took an overwhelming majority of the seats, indicating popular support for his position.

Brunei Indians’ ambivalence about the rebellion may be the result of their personal connections to some of the rebels. Hence they are unable to see the rebels as traitors. Rather they see them as misguided Malays who believed in their rights to establish an independent state of Brunei. B. A. Hussainmiya points out that, ‘the participation of the local people in the rebellion was so widespread that virtually every family in Brunei was involved or affected in one way or another by the rebellion’.Footnote ⁸³ Lazarus George's recollections reflect this familiarity with members of the local Malay population who either held official positions or were connected to the Company: ‘I knew. . . a district officer in Kuala Belait. We used to call him “Nehruji”. He was such a nice man. . . a sweet fellow. Malay. He had a son who was involved with this fellow, Azahari. He was caught. But his father was a very nice man.’ Another Brunei Indian, Ramachandran Nair, knew ‘a local boy’ who had been in the drafting section who, according to Nair, joined the rebellion ‘because he thought without working he can live nicely’. When the Company fired him for his participation in the rebellion, he started a store where Nair and his wife made a point of shopping. In the wake of the rebellion, the Sultan suspended the constitution and declined to join the Malaysian Federation, citing widespread popular sentiment against the union as a cause for the rebellion. The arrival of Gurkha troops—with whom they felt they shared a kinship—to quell the uprising was a source of pride for the Brunei Indians who noted that without the Gurkhas and their continuing presence in Brunei today, Brunei could not be secured against dissident forces. Hence while there is sympathy for the local Malay society, Brunei Indians acknowledge the vulnerability of the state of Brunei.

Brunei-Indian accounts of the 1962 rebellion thus intersect British, state, and local histories. In narrating Brunei, these stories play a crucial role in asserting Brunei Indians as witnesses of Brunei's modern histories, and players in the making of Brunei. Thus the colonial subjectivity acknowledged by Brunei Indians must be juxtaposed with the agency that Brunei Indians claim in negotiating their status as workers and expatriates in Brunei to find an ‘honoured’ place in Brunei society. This discursive imagining is particularly relevant since Indians are conspicuous by their absence in colonial and state histories of Brunei. Often categorized as ‘others’ in national documents, and excluded from the privileges of citizenship, Indians of the 1940s–1960s genealogy of migration to Brunei remain anonymous in the narration of Brunei.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is in and from the diaspora, therefore, that Brunei Indians reinscribe their place in the making of modern Brunei.