february, 2025

6feb4:00 pm- 6:00 pmPetition of Laborers: Life of Workers under Indenture

Event Details

Date: Thursday, Feburary 6th, 2025
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: 411 Fayerweather Hall, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027

Ashutosh Kumar with Kalyani Ramnath (Discussant)

Abstract
This paper explores the gender relations among the Indian indentured workers on the colonial plantations of Fiji and Natal in order to understand the complexities of plantation life. Historians have studied the gender relations on the plantations either through official writings, notings or through observers’ accounts and hence, it reveals the limitations of objective portrayal of the life of labourers on the plantations.  This paper underscores such limitations and uses the labourers’ petitions, depositions and letters written largely in Indian languages either by women or men, individually or collectively, to different authorities in order to understand the plantation regime in terms of gender relations. Through a close reading of these petitions and examination of the conditions of their production and their reception by the colonial authorities, the paper argues that plantation space became a sight of the struggle between women’s agency and Indian patriarchy in which violence became an unavoidable consequence.

Brief Bio:
Ashutosh Kumar is Professor of History at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. Currently he is Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow at Harvard University, USA. He earned his PhD from the History Department of the University of Delhi, where he also taught from 2012 to 2014. He was a SEPHIS Fellow at International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam during his PhD. He was fellow at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom; Yale University, USA; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, and at Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. He is president of Indian Association for South Asian Studies (IASAS) and President of Centre for Alternative Studies in Social Sciences, New Delhi. His Publications include Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920, Cambridge University Press, 2017; Indian Soldiers in the First World War: Re-visiting a Global Conflict, 1914-1918, edited with Claude Markovits, Routledge 2020; Warfare and Society in British India, 1757-1947, edited with Kaushik Roy, Routledge, 2022; and ‘Girmitiyas and Global Indian Diaspora: Origins, Memories and Identities ’ Cambridge University Press, 2024. He is working on his next book broadly entitled Coolinama: Lost Voices of Indentured Indians.

Time

(Thursday) 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Location

411 Fayerweather Hall

1180 Amsterdam Avenue

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