Maritime workers from India made inter-oceanic commerce possible within the British Empire but their identities and roles were highly contested and fluid. G. Balachandran's sophisticated book makes a major contribution to their labour history during the period of high imperialism. He demonstrates these seafarers’ diverse origins, working conditions aboard, and lives ashore, mainly in Britain and India but also in Australia, North America, and the European continent. He is both highly knowledgeable about the lived experience of these Indian seafarers and also acutely sensitive to the cultural implications of British discourses about them.
Illustrating the complexity of these workers’ lives, Balachandran begins his book with the brief biography of one of them: Jan Mohamed, born in 1897. During his many crossings of the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, and his sequential roles ashore, he changed his legal identity and name multiple times. Despite his rural peasant origin in landlocked Punjab, he migrated to Bombay where he signed on to a British merchant ship as a coal trimmer at age seventeen. Torpedoed during World War I, he survived, receiving medals and commendations for bravery from the British crown. Later in his seafaring career, he deserted his ship in New York. Moving to Detroit, he worked in a car factory. There, he was naturalized as an US citizen, only to have his citizenship later revoked on racial grounds. Taking to the sea again, he eventually returned to Bombay. There he stowed away on a Finnish ship; later joining its crew, he obtained his discharge papers in Belgium. Returning to Britain, he was illegally deported. He protested and smuggled himself back in. Shifting British legal definitions and also jurisdictional disputes among government departments about the rights and legal status of colonial subjects kept Jan Mohamed in legal limbo, but he continued to challenge official efforts to dismiss and deport him. To bolster his case, he joined the National Sailors’ and Firemen's Union (NSFU, formerly the National Union of Seamen). Finally, in 1930, he negotiated with the British Government for a certificate of nationality as an Indian subject of the British crown and steamed out of the official records. His life is unusual, not so much for the multiple changes in his identities as for the extent of the documentation of his “identity trail” (p. 202) in official archives.
One of the central issues throughout this period, brought out especially effectively in Balachandran's book, were the disputed definitions of these Indian seafarers, often collectively called lascars. They came together for a voyage from various social origins and regions. Some were born into traditional fishing or sailing communities, but many were from peasant villages, often far inland, like Jan Mohamed. Although classed as Indians, many were not actually born in India but rather elsewhere in the Indian Ocean region like the Maldives or Aden. Many were not professional seamen in that they undertook many different jobs in their lifetimes.
Balachandran shows how many of these men chose to work only occasionally at sea and only when it was the best available option, taking up other jobs as opportunities offered. Thus, when the British Indian Army recruited heavily for soldiers during World War I, the supply of Indian workers available for shipping declined significantly. Conversely, when British immigration restrictions tightened, the supply of Indian seafarers rose, since many regarded this as a means of reaching Britain to work as peddlers, restaurant cooks, or other land-based workers – what some Britons disparaged as “one voyage men” (p. 182). Some seafarers used their allotted berths to store goods that they traded from port to port, while they slept on deck. Others signed on mainly to gain passage to Mecca for the Haj. Nevertheless, many of the jobs aboard required great skill and stamina in the face of many dangers and hardships, offering only low pay, with various legal and illegal deductions, fees, and penalties taken by their employers, white officers, and Indian petty officers and recruiters.
Recruitment of maritime workers remained highly competitive since shipping companies, ship captains, employment brokers, ghat serangs (“dock headmen”), and British officials in India and Britain all sought to control this maritime labour supply. The British Parliament passed various regulations specifying wages and working conditions, although many of these remained unenforced. White-dominated British unions (like the International Labour Organization and the NSFU that Jan Mohamed briefly joined) occasionally demanded higher wages and better working conditions for Indian seafarers, but usually so that white British seamen would not be undercut by cheap Indian labour. Communist-led unions were usually far more racially inclusive than other European labour unions. To support British policies and interests, government reports and newspapers often made accusations of corruption, usually against Indian seamen and intermediaries. One theme throughout Balachandran's book remains his insightful analysis of how Britons often tried discursively to conflate Indian seafarers with coolies – a racially pejorative for all unskilled Indian manual labourers.
By concentrating on the period of European steamship ascendency, Balachandran looks at a time when Indian seamen were increasingly deskilled, at least in the eyes of Britons. Many ship owners hired Indians to save on labour costs. Unlike white seamen, who enlisted under the terms of European Articles, most Indian seamen served under racially defined official Asiatic Articles – with lower wages, worse food and housing, more restrictions on where they could sail, and limits on where they could be discharged. British ship owners often regarded British sailors, especially those in militant labour unions, as expensive, dangerous, and disruptive, while these owners tended to discount the courage and manliness of Indian seamen. This stereotype made Indian seafarers appear both more docile and less reliable in shipboard emergencies. Indeed, Indian seamen tended to desert in port rather than mutiny aboard. Despite the many powerful forces working against them collectively, these seafarers remained diverse in their identities and interests.
Owing to their different origins, social identities, religions, and roles aboard, these seamen had limits on their solidarity. Men from specific regions of India tended to specialize in the different departments of these steamships. In some departments of the ship, including the cabin and dining service staff, there was little that was maritime about them other than the locale. Goans and other Indian Catholics (by religion or culture) tended to predominate in this department. In other departments, like the firemen who stoked and tended the massive steamship boilers, their specialized skills involved sorting, hauling, and shoveling coal, and they did not see the sea while on duty. The various parts of the deck crews also had particular skills and tended to originate in specific regions.
These disparate workers formed a variety of small, fragmented, and transient unions, including the Indian Quarter Masters’ Union, the Asiatic Seamen's Union, the Indian Seamen's Anjuman, and the separate Indian Seamen's Unions in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Bombay (now Mumbai). Further, the activist seafarers who organized and led many of these unions often themselves went to sea, thus weakening the continuity of leadership. Yet, rival Indian unions, including those led by shore-based labour brokers or politicians in the Indian National Congress, lacked credibility among seafarers. Nonetheless, these maritime workers identified with each other sufficiently that, in 1939, many of them simultaneously went on strike in ports throughout the British Empire. Overall, however, Balachandran concludes that “[t]heir life strategies were driven by a wish to avoid proletarianization, not embrace it” (p. 264).
Balachandran necessarily relies heavily on British records and accounts of these Indian maritime labourers, but he thoughtfully reads these sources against the grain to recover both the actual lives of these men as well as how they were culturally constructed by Britons. Balachandran's intentional use of the question mark in his title indicates his heuristic use of “globalizing”, highlighting the term's ambiguity. Employers mobilized and deployed these Indian workers across the earth's oceans. But also these workers lived in “fluid, yet discontinuous, spaces of labour mobility where boundaries, far from becoming extinct, are unstable and as liable to contraction and realignment as to conditional expansion, and where boundary crossings are contested, negotiated, thwarted, and continually executed” (pp. 20–21). Balachandran concentrates on these maritime workers, thus complementing academic studies on the rest of the British and Indian shipping industries and on British imperial maritime commerce generally.
This impressive volume greatly expands and deepens our understanding of the complex worlds of Indian seafarers. Balachandran bases his impressive analysis on extensive and thorough research in archives in Britain, India, Australia, and the European continent. Scholars will find rich material and much insight that will enable them to include these workers within social and labour history globally.
