Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies
Volume 3, Issue 2, January 2024
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The journal is a bi-annual peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by Pluto Journals in partnership with the Ameena Gafoor Institute for the Study of Indentureship and Its Legacies (ameenagafoorinstitute.org). The journal is a unique and unprecedented academic space where the study of indentureship, as a distinct form of unfree labour, can be analysed in all its forms. No such journal currently exists anywhere in the world, despite the critical importance of the system of indenture to world history.
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Contents
List of contributors vi
Introduction
1. Maria del Pilar Kaladeen 1
Editor’s introduction
Articles
2. Aneeta Sundaraj 3
Foothills Estate was a lovely place
3. Doug Munro 31
Brij V. Lal and K.L. Gillion: The apprentice and the sorcerer
4. Karin Shankar 53
Indentured archives and speculative futures in Singapore: A conversation with artist Priyageetha Dia
5. Melissa Baksh 63
In conversation with Suchitra Mattai
6. Maria del Pilar Kaladeen 79
Elusive mother country: The literature of the Indian-Caribbean Windrush
Reviews
7. Holly Eva Ryan 98
Love the Dark Days by Ira Mathur
8. Lomarsh Roopnarine 102
Chinese Indentured Labor in the Dutch East Indies 1880–1942: Tin, Tobacco, Timber and the Penal Sanction by Gregor Benton
9. Nienke Boer 105
Contradictory Indianness: Indenture, Creolization, and Literary Imaginary by Atreyee Phukan
Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies
EDITORS
Amar Wahab, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen, David Dabydeen
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS
Eve Kanram, Lynne Macedo
AMEENA GAFOOR INSTITUTE ACADEMIC ADVISORY BOARD
Grace Aneiza Ali (New York University)
Gaiutra Bahadur (Rutgers University)
Eddie Bruce-Jones (Birbeck College, London University)
Ajay Chhabra (Actor and Artistic Director)
Richard Fung (OCAD University)
Rajrani Gobin (Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Mauritius)
Andil Gosine (York University Toronto)
Betty Govinden (Alumna, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal)
Moon-Ho Jung (University of Washington)
Aliyah Khan (University of Michigan )
Brij Lal (Professor Emeritus, The Australian National University)
Shivanjani Lal (Artist)
Anne-Marie Lee-Loy (Ryerson University)
Kathleen López (Rutgers University-New Brunswick)
Paloma Martin (University of Guyana)
Heidi Safia Mirza (Professor Emeritus UCL, Institute of Education, University of London)
Judith Misrahi-Barak (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)
Michael Mitchell (University of Warwick and University of Paderborn)
Nalini Mohabir (Concordia University)
Patricia Mohammed (Professor Emerita University of the West Indies)
Satendra Nandan (Professor Emeritus University of Canberra)
Ken Ramchand (Professor Emeritus, University of the West Indies)
Tina K. Ramnarine (Royal Holloway University of London)
Lomarsh Roopnarine (Jackson State University)
Brinsley Samaroo (Professor Emeritus, University of the West Indies)
Verene Shepherd (Professor Emerita, University of the West Indies)
Nur Sobers-Khan (British Library)
Janet Steel (Commonwealth International)
Stephanos Stephanides (Professor Emeritus, University of Cyprus)
Alissa Trotz (University of Toronto)
Mark Tumbridge (University of Guyana)
Athol Williams (University of Cape Town)
Lisa Yun (State University of New York)
Contributors
Nienke Boer is a Lecturer in World Literatures in English at the University of Sydney. Her first book, The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World (Duke University Press, 2023) examines narratives of enslavement, indenture, and war imprisonment to argue for the dangers of sentiment as a form of either representation or resistance.
Priyageetha Dia is an artist working with time-based media and installation. Recent exhibitions include Singapore Art Museum (2023); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala (2022–2023); La Trobe Art Institute, Australia (2022); National Gallery Singapore (2020); and Art Science Museum, Singapore (2019). She was an artist-in-residence at the Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2022 and the Studio Residencies for South East Asian Artists in the European Union at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands in 2023. She is currently a resident under the Singapore Management University –Artist in Residence Libraries from August to November 2023. She lives and works in Singapore and can be contacted at https://priyageethadia.com/
Melissa Baksh is a London-based art historian, writer, curator, educator and broadcaster. A desire to make art accessible to a wide range of audiences underpins her work, and she has delivered lectures, tours and workshops at institutions such as the National Gallery, Hayward Gallery and Wellcome Collection. She has written for publications including The Guardian, The Times, the Independent, The Art Newspaper, Frieze and Art Review on old masters, contemporary art, colonial history and public art and monuments.
Maria del Pilar Kaladeen is the great-grandchild of first-generation Indian indentured labourers, brought to the Caribbean by the British in the nineteenth century. She specializes in the study of the history of the system of Indian indenture in the Caribbean and has edited two anthologies of writing on this subject. The first anthology, We Mark Your Memory, (University of London Press, 2018) focused on writing by descendants of indentured labourers from across the diaspora and included contributors from Fiji, Mauritius, St Vincent and Malaysia. The second anthology The Other Windrush (Pluto Press, 2021) concerned the lives of Windrush-era migrants of Indian and Chinese Caribbean heritage. Maria is an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London. Her life writing has been published in the Conversation, Wasafiri and the Funambulist.
Doug Munro is an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Queensland, Australia. After completing a PhD at Macquarie University (Sydney), he turned his attention to indentured labour in the Pacific Islands. His teaching career included a stint at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji in the 1990s. Then he became a freelance historian in New Zealand, which included involvement in a major project on suicide in twentieth-century New Zealand. Doug will continue to write about historians of indenture, including the almost-unknown Donald Calman and on Brij V. Lal’s contribution to the historiography of Indo-Fijian indenture and the Indian diaspora. His latest book is co-authorship of Chicanery: Senior Academic Appointments in Antipodean Anthropology, 1920–1960 (Berghahn, 2023). Doug can be contacted at munro47@123456yahoo.com
Suchitra Mattai is a multi-disciplinary artist of Indo-Caribbean descent who explores how memory and myth can be used to unravel historical narratives and to make space for the voices of people who were once cast aside. Suchitra’s mixed-media paintings, sculptures, and installations, which often combine processes and materials associated with the domestic sphere, such as embroidery, weaving, and found clothing from the South Asian diaspora, etc., serve to honour the labour of women. Suchitra received an MFA in painting and drawing and an MA in South Asian art from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Past projects include group exhibitions at the MCA Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum, the Sharjah Biennial, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the MCA Denver, and upcoming solo exhibitions (2024) include the ICA San Francisco, the Tampa Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and Socrates Sculpture Park. Her works are represented in collections which include Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Joslyn Museum of Art, the Crocker Museum of Art, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Suchitra is also a recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.
Lomarsh Roopnarine, from Guyana, is a Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Jackson State University. Roopnarine has published three books and over three dozen articles on the South Asian Diaspora in the Caribbean. Roopnarine’s most recent book The Indian Caribbean: Migration and Identity in the Diaspora was the 2018 recipient of The Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award.
Holly Eva Ryan is Reader in International Relations and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean at Queen Mary University of London. Her research is eclectic and spans practical aesthetics, social movement studies, collective memory and theories/practices of friendship and solidarity.
Karin Shankar is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Her research interests include contemporary South Asian performance and visual culture, transnational feminist and queer aesthetics, and anti-colonial form. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Women & Performance, TDR, Feminist Teacher, Art India, Performance Matters, ASAP Journal, Performance and Philosophy, Performance Matters, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, and elsewhere.
Aneeta Sundaraj is an award-winning short story writer whose work has been featured in a national newspaper, various journals, magazines, ezines and anthologies. Aneeta’s bestselling novel, The Age of Smiling Secrets was shortlisted for the Book Award 2020 in Malaysia. Throughout, Aneeta continued to pursue her academic interests and, in 2021, successfully completed a doctoral thesis entitled ‘Management of Prosperity Among Artistes in Malaysia’. Aneeta gives back to the writing community by managing the Great Story Competition (@httags), which is hosted on her website called ‘How to Tell a Great Story’.