¹ Brunei Indian interviewed in Kerala, India, February 2009.

² In this article, I focus on the Company's Indian staff and their families who came to Seria between the 1940s and 1960s, and refer to them as ‘Brunei Indians’. While other Indians lived in Brunei during this period and were shopkeepers or worked for the Brunei government or in other companies providing services to the Company, their numbers were few and they did not present a significantly cohesive and distinctly visible community.

³ Some of the Indians I interviewed have since died.

⁴ In the 1960s the British Malayan Petroleum Company was renamed Brunei Shell Petroleum Company. While my respondents variously referred to the Company as British Malayan Petroleum Company and Brunei Shell Petroleum Company, they usually referred to the Company as ‘Shell’ or ‘Shell Company’, revealing their acute consciousness of the nature of the multinational and global corporation that employed them rather than a regional oil industry.

⁵ In July 1946 Sarawak became a British colony when Charles Vyner Brooke, the ‘white Rajah’, ceded the territory to Britain.

⁶ The nurses were mostly Malayali Christians. Of the women I interviewed, four had taught at local schools. The husbands of three of these Indian women worked for the British Malayan Petroleum Company. ‘Asiatic staff’ was a term used interchangeably with ‘regional staff’ to distinguish this workforce from ‘senior staff’ and labourers.

⁷ The fieldwork I have drawn on in this article is part of a larger ethnographic and historical study of the diasporic experiences of Indians who worked for Shell Oil Company in Brunei between the1940s and 1960s and of these Brunei Indians in India after their retirement.

⁸ Forty-three of the interviews took place in the homes of my informants, three were conducted in the homes of mutual friends, one at a restaurant, and three at my parents’ home in Kerala.

⁹ F. Lionnet and S. Shih, Minor Transnationalism, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2005. I am grateful to Parma Roy for suggesting this framework for my work.

¹⁰ Brah, A., Cartographies of Diaspora, Routledge, London, 1996, p. 183Google Scholar.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid, p. 184.

¹³ See, for instance, Raj, D. S., Where Are You From? Middle-Class Migrants in the Modern World, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003Google Scholar; Carter, M., Voices From Indenture: Experiences of Indian Migrants in the British Empire, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1996Google Scholar; Viranjini, M., Callaloo or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2001Google Scholar; Werbner, P., Imagined Diasporas Among Manchester Muslims, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, 2002Google Scholar; Shukla, S., India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2003Google Scholar; Maira, S., Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2002Google Scholar; Leonard, K., Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1992Google Scholar; Khan, A., Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity Among South Asians in Trinidad, Duke University Press, Durham, 2004CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Brian Axel draws attention to the positioning of an ‘elsewhere’ in relation to the homeland that characterizes diaspora studies. Axel, B. K., The Nation's Tortured Body, Duke University Press, Durham, 2001Google Scholar, p. 8. In his study of the Sikh diaspora, Axel inverts this positioning of the homeland as a ‘common place of origin’ by arguing that the Sikh homeland, rather than travelling with the Sikh diaspora, is produced from the diaspora (see Chapter 5).

¹⁵ Ho, E., ‘Empire through Diasopric Eyes: A View from the Other Boat’, Society for Comparative Study of Society and History, Vol. 46, 2004, p. 214Google Scholar.

¹⁶ For a discussion on colonial mimicry, see Bhabha, H., The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Spurr, D., The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration, Duke University Press, Durham, 1993Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Mani, A., ‘A Community in Transition: Indians in Negara Brunei Darussalam’ in Sandhu, K. S. and Mani, A. (eds), Indian Communities in South East Asia, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Times Academic Press, Singapore, 1993Google Scholar, p. 2.

¹⁹ By the early twentieth century, the entire island of Borneo had come under European colonial rule. While Britain controlled Brunei and North Borneo, and Sarawak became the fiefdom of the Brooke ‘Rajahs’, the Dutch controlled South and East Borneo. Today, excluding Brunei, the former British territories of Borneo are part of Malaysia, while the former Dutch territory is in Indonesia.

²⁰ Mani, ‘A Community in Transition’, pp. 5–6.

²¹ Peel, W. J., Annual Report on Brunei for the Year 1946, Malayan Union Government Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1948, p. 10Google Scholar.

²² As I. J. Seccombe and R. I. Lawless explain, ‘The terms and conditions which could be offered to Indians were controlled by formal Foreign Service Agreements (FSA) which were authorized by the Protector of Emigrants, a Government of India official. The FSAs not only specified a minimum contract period (of one or three years), wage rates and terms of industrial accident compensation, but also that the employee's passage abroad would be paid by the employer. The employer also had to pay wages from the day of recruitment (rather than on arrival in the zone of operations) and had to guarantee to repatriate the employee at the end of his contract.’ Seccombe, I. J. and Lawless, R. I., ‘Foreign Worker Dependence in the Gulf, and the International Oil Companies: 1910–1950’, International Migration Review, Vol. 20 (3), 1986, pp. 559–560CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Walton Look Lai explains that kanganis were labour headmen who were ‘influential immigrant workers sent by host country plantations back to their respective Indian villages to recruit new groups of workers on a seasonal or long-term basis’ for plantations in South and South East Asia. Look Lai, W., ‘Asian Contract and Free Migrations to the Americas’ in Eltis, D. (ed.), Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2002, p. 234Google Scholar.

²⁴ Pretty, E. E. F., Report on the State of Brunei for the Year 1925, Singapore Printing Office, Singapore, 1926, pp. 8–9Google Scholar. During this period, Seria was under the jurisdiction of the Belait administrative unit. The town of Kuala Belait, often referred to as Belait, is between Seria and the Belait River, and across from the oil town of Miri in Sarawak (now in Malaysia).

²⁵ See Mangru, B., Benevolent Neutrality: Indian Government Policy and Labour Migration to British Guiana 1854–1884, Hansin Publishing Limited, Hertford, 1987Google Scholar; Tinker, H., ‘Indians in South East Asia: Imperial Auxiliaries’ in Clarke, C., Peach, C., and Vertovec, S. (eds), South Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990Google Scholar, pp. 39–56; Look Lai, W., Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 2004Google Scholar; Carter, M., Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius 1834–1874, Oxford University Press, Delhi and New York, 1995Google Scholar; Carter, Voices from Indenture; Ramaswamy, P., Plantation Labour, Unions, Capital, and the State in Peninsula Malaysia, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur and New York, 1994Google Scholar; Breman, J., Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial Order in South East Asia, Oxford University Press, Delhi and New York, 1989Google Scholar.

²⁶ Sandhu points out that South Indian ‘Adi-dravidas’ were especially seen as ideal labour for picking crops and for road and railway projects. Many of the European planters who moved to Malaya came from the coffee plantations of Ceylon where they had become familiar with South Indian or ‘Madrasi’ workers. Moreover, Sandhu notes that ‘The Malayan government and employers were well aware of the economic and social stresses prevalent among the poorer classes of India and therefore, quite naturally entertained sanguine hopes that there would be a veritable voluntary and uninhibited flood of Indian labour, especially from South India—the home of the largest concentrations of Chamars (Cherumans), Pariahs (Paraiyans), Pallas (Pallans) and other depressed “lepers” of Indian society.’ Sandhu, K. S., Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of their Immigration and Settlement, 1786–1957, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969Google Scholar, pp. 57, 58.

²⁷ Peel, Annual Report on Brunei for the Year. Between 1906 and 1938, wages were paid in Straits dollars. After 1939, the Malayan dollar replaced the Straits dollar. Its use was discontinued during the Japanese invasion of Borneo.

²⁸ The post-war migration of Indians to Brunei forges a distinctly different trajectory of diasporic formation than the post-war migration of Indians to the United States and Britain. Whereas Brunei Indians who were recruited as staff and labourers were predominantly from Kerala, the post-war genealogies of Indian American community formation in the United States and the Asian Indian diaspora in Britain are characterized by the diversity of languages, regions, caste, and class represented in the Indian diaspora. As Shukla points out in India Abroad, Indian diasporas in the United States and Britain are marked by fissures and contestations over the meanings and geographies of ‘Indianness’ and memories of the past. Shukla, India Abroad, pp. 27–28.

²⁹ Seccombe and Lawless, ‘Foreign Worker Dependence’, p. 550.

³⁰ Mani notes that the state of Brunei treated Indians as ‘sojourners’ and, as the Brunei Indians I interviewed emphasized, permanent residency permits were seldom granted to them. Kesavapany, K., Mani, A., and Ramaswamy, P. (eds), Rising India and the Indian Communities in East Asia, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2008, p. 184CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, p. 69.

³² Halliday, F., ‘Labour Migration in the Middle East’, Middle East Research and Information Project Reports, Vol. 59, 1977, p. 55Google Scholar.

³³ Melamid, A., ‘The Geographical Pattern of Iranian Oil Development’, Economic Development, Vol. 35 (3), 1959, p. 216Google Scholar.

³⁴ Seccombe and Lawless, ‘Foreign Worker Dependence’, pp. 557–558.

³⁵ Seccombe notes that as early as 1948, Bahrain complained about the number of Indians gaining employment over local workers. Seccombe, I. J., ‘Labour Migration to the Arabian Gulf: Evolution and Characteristics 1920–1950’, Bulletin, British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 10 (1), 1983, pp. 3–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ It was in the 1970s that South Asians, and Indians in particular, began to dominate the expatriate workforce in Gulf countries, being employed mostly outside the oilfield in construction and professional fields. See Weiner, M., ‘International Migration and Development: Indians in the Persian Gulf’, Population and Development Review, Vol. 8 (1), 1982, pp. 1–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; K. C. Zachariah, B. A. Prakash, and I. S. Rajan, ‘Working in the Gulf: Employment, Wages and working conditions’ in K. C. Zachariah, K. P. Kannan, and I. S. Rajan, Kerala's Gulf Connection, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, 2002; Binod Khadria, ‘India: Skilled Migration to Developed Countries, Labour Migration to the Gulf’ in S. Castles and R. D. Wise (eds), Migration and Development: Perspectives from the South, International Organization for Migration, Geneva, 2007.

³⁷ I use pseudonyms for all my informants.

³⁸ A thatched-roof house.

³⁹ As Lippard explains, the lure of the local is ‘the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation’. Lippard, L. R., The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multi-Centered Society, The New Press, New York, 1997Google Scholar, p. 7.

⁴⁰ Ibid, pp. 7 and 9.

⁴¹ During this period, the European staff was also accommodated in kajang houses, although as the women started arriving, they and married couples were soon provided with ‘wooden bungalows’.

⁴² On 8 and 9 December 1941, as the Japanese army advanced, British Malayan Petroleum Company technical staff and the Punjabi garrison in Seria sabotaged oil wells and destroyed facilities and machinery as part of its denial operation. However, the Japanese rehabilitated the wells with local skilled labour and by 1944 had managed to double the pre-war production levels. While experienced European staff was evacuated in order to ensure that their skills could not be utilized by the advancing Japanese army, the Asian employees (skilled and labourers) were left to fend for themselves. Some of these workers who were located put to work in the oilfields of Seria and Miri by the Japanese were Indians. Reese, B., Masa Jepun—Sarawak Under the Japanese 1941–1945, Sarawak Literary Society, Kuala Lumpur, 1998Google Scholar, pp. 147–148; see also Gin, O. K. (ed.), The Japanese Empire in the Tropics: Selected Documents and Reports of the Japanese Period in Sarawak Northwest Borneo, Ohio University Centre for International Studies Monographs in International Studies, South East Asia Series No. 101, Athens, 1998, pp. 76–77Google Scholar for report on denial operations in Miri.

⁴³ These figures are derived from the interviews I conducted with Brunei-Indian men, most of whom variously insisted that the Indian staff in Seria numbered between 600 and 800 in the 1950s, their numbers diminishing significantly after the 1960s. According to some, by the middle of the 1960s, Indian staff members in Seria were down to about 500 men since, between 1961–1963, the Company had repatriated a significant number of the Indian staff during a period of staff ‘redundancy’. I was unable to access Company documents from this period, hence no comparative study of Brunei Indians’ retrospective accounting of the numbers of Indian staff could be made with Company sources. Clearly these numbers are not reflected in the Brunei Census, which did not distinguish between the Indian staff and the Indian labour employed by the Company.

⁴⁴ Miri was established in 1910 and had been an important oilfield prior to the Second World War. By the early 1940s, however, Miri fields had declined and oil production in Seria surpassed that of Miri. Thus Brunei Indians’ arrival in Brunei after the emergence of Seria as the more productive and lucrative oilfield shapes their dismissal of Miri as an insignificant place on the routes of their travel.

⁴⁵ Brunei Town refers to Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei.

⁴⁶ See Dening, G., Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, p. 177Google Scholar. In contemporary travels, beaches continue to be sites of encounter between foreigners and indigenous peoples and local residents. However, along the routes of global capital, beaches are constituted for consumption by tourists who seek instant packaged gratification rather than for travellers in search of new lives or the experience of places. Beaches therefore double as locales of pleasure for tourists and places of work for residents. See Enloe, C., Bananas, Beaches and Bases, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Dening, G., Islands and Beaches, Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas 1774–1880, University Press of Hawai‘i, Honolulu, 1980, p. 6Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ Gilroy, P., The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 4Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Pratt, M. L., Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Routledge, London, 1992CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵¹ Burr, C., ‘Some Adventures of the Boys: Enniskillen Township's “Foreign Drillers”, Imperialism and Colonial Discourse, 1873–1923’, Labour/Le Travail 51, 2005, pp. 47–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 7.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Grewal, I., Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1996, p. 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ It is interesting to contrast here the modernity that steamships represented to Europeans travelling along the geography of empire. The modernity that informed the experiences of Europeans and Indians in their passages to Seria diverged in the meanings constituted and this gap shaped the agency of modernity in defining differential relations of power. Angela Woollacott, for instance, notes that for Australian women who travelled to England, the journey was a ‘matter of education about and participation in the empire to which they belonged’ that enabled them to emphasize their whiteness and imperial heritage. Woollacott, A., ‘“All this is the Empire, I told Myself”: Australian Women's Voyages “Home” and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 102 (4), 1997, pp. 1004–1005CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ Carter, P., The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Cresswell, T., Place: A Short Introduction, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford, United Kingdom and Victoria, Australia, 2004Google Scholar, p. 43; Casey, E., The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1998, p. 201Google Scholar. Tim Cresswell refers to the theme of non-place in Edward Relph's study, Place and Placeness where ‘non-place’ signals a condition of alienation that erodes a sense of place. He also notes that Marc Augé perceived non-places as ‘sites marked by their transience’ and ‘unrooted places marked by mobility and travel—the preponderance of mobility’, pp. 45–46. While in Relph and Augé's studies, non-places are postmodern phenomena that evoke the future, my use of the term ‘non-place’ signifies a landscape intrinsically outside the present and the future since it is yet to be mapped by the technologies of modernity and narrated into historical discourse. Hence, in this article, non-place does not denote ‘the end of place’, (Cresswell, Place, p. 43) but the point in time and space before the beginning of place.

⁵⁸ Casey, The Fate of Place, p. 344, n. 2.

⁵⁹ Victor King points out that the term Dayak collectively refers to a heterogeneous grouping of non-Malay and non-Muslim indigenous peoples who speak a variety of languages and have diverse cultural practices. As King notes, ‘this rather imprecise term covers . . . tribal groupings such as the Ibans, Kayans, Bidayuhs, Kendayans, Malohs or Tamans, Lun Bawangs and others . . . ’ (King, Peoples of Borneo, p. 29).

⁶⁰ See King, V. T. (ed), The Best of Borneo Travel, Oxford University Press, Singapore, 1992Google Scholar; King, V. T. (ed.), The Peoples of Borneo, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993Google Scholar; Hoskins, J. (ed.), Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996Google Scholar.

⁶¹ See Comaroff, J. L. and Comaroff, J., Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Vol. 2, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1997CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas, N., ‘Colonial Conversions: Difference, Hierarchy, and History in Early Twentieth-Century Evangelical Propaganda’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 34, 1992CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶² Alatas, S., The Myth of the Lazy Savage: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16^th to the 20^th century and its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism, Frank Cass, London, 1977Google Scholar.

⁶³ Kerani is the Malay word for clerk.

⁶⁴ Brunei Indians used the conventional title ‘Mrs’ to refer to women married to Brunei-Indian men. I have kept the gendered convention in my text since it calls attention to the ways in which women in the oilfields were ‘incorporated’ as wives. Their place in the Company town was determined by their husband's rank and occupation in the oil town. Soraya Tremayne describes the processes by which European wives of Shell Company employees became a part of the community of Shell wives and were expected to acquire the ‘Shell wife identity’. Indian women in Brunei were similarly constituted, although the pressures to support their husbands’ professional identity were more acute as the men rose to senior staff positions. S. Tremayne, ‘Shell Wives in Limbo’ in H. Callan and S. Ardener (eds), The Incorporated Wife, Croom Helm, London, 1984, pp. 120–134.

⁶⁵ Japanese policies and the state of war caused acute food shortages in Borneo by the end of the Second World War. Allied bombing of the Miri-Seria area had begun in November 1944 and ended only in September 1945, when the Japanese surrendered as the Australian Ninth Division invaded Miri and Seria. Reese, Masa Jepun; Tarling, N., A Sudden Rampage: The Japanese Occupation of South East Asia, 1941–1945, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2001Google Scholar. Horton points out that allied bombing had destroyed all the townships in Brunei, except Kampong Ayer, the river village, in Brunei Bay. Horton, A. V., ‘British Administration of Brunei 1906–1959’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 20 (2), 1986, p. 369CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁶ Historically, colonial anxiety about maintaining an imperial hauteur in the colonies served to regulate who could enter the colony and when. Although power was asserted through physical domination and diffused through colonial realignments of native systems of meaning, colonists were equally concerned with the affirmation of power through cultural and social tropes that asserted European racial exclusivity. Hence, the anxiety of persons deemed socially inferior—poor whites, orphans, or disreputable characters—sullying the image of empire led to concerted efforts by the colonial administration to restrict migration to the colonies. See Arnold, D., ‘European Orphans and Vagrants in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 2 (2), January 1979Google Scholar. Kenneth Ballhatchet notes that, as early as 1793, Henry Dundas, the president of the Board of Control who oversaw the East India Company's affairs, advocated the control of European settlers in India since it would otherwise ‘annihilate the respect paid to the British character’. Ballhatchet, K., Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793–1905, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1980, p. 96.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Stoler, A. L., Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, California University Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002, p. 2Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Stoler, A. L., ‘Rethinking Colonial Boundaries: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule’ in Dirks, N. B. (ed.), Colonialism and Culture, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1992, p. 332Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ In Malaya, for example, the presence of European women served to delineate and justify exclusive racial spaces and segregation. John Butcher points out that when local Chinese residents protested the creation of a separate first class railway carriage for the Chinese, railway officials contended that it was in response to complaints by European women who were offended by the behaviour of Chinese passengers. Butcher, J. G., The British in Malaya 1880–1941: The Social History of a European Community in Colonial South-East Asia, Oxford University Press, Kula Lumpur, 1979, p. 98Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ See Blunt, A., ‘Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886–1925’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 24 (4), 1999CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷¹ For instance, the arrival of European wives in Malaya after the First World War brought new social codes that regulated the lives of unmarried men who maintained appearances by keeping their mistresses out of sight. Butcher, The British in Malaysia, p. 210.

⁷² See Callaway, H., Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1987CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷³ In her essay on the Canadian drillers from Enniskillen township who went to the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies between the 1870s and the Second World War, Christina Burr contends that the arrival of white women in the oilfields after the First World War coincided with new attempts by the oil companies and colonial administrations to exercise control over labour. Burr notes that segregated housing spaces were created to protect white women and their children from ‘the natives’ while ‘the creation of European-like environments and the presence of white women were intended to insulate the men from the contamination of sexual contact with native women’. Burr, ‘Some Adventures’, p. 70. By the 1920s, Miri in Sarawak had three clubs and a church for Europeans, institutions that reflect the stabilization of the European community and coincided with the presence of white women and children.

⁷⁴ Dua, Enakshi, ‘Racialising Imperial Canada: Indian Women and the Making of Ethnic Communities’ in Burton, A. (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, Routledge, London and New York, 1999, p. 126Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ I learned of only two ‘marriages’ between Dayak women and Indians who worked as regional staff during this period. The Brunei Indians I interviewed were uncertain whether the men had married the women formally. V. R. Menon recounted a Goan staff member as having a Dayak ‘keep’ in Seria and a wife in Goa. From Brunei-Indian anecdotal accounts, however, it appears that a few Indian labourers married Chinese and Dayak women. V. R. Menon, however, pointed out that during the 1940s and 1950s, a significant number of the Indian staff as well as labourers had relationships with local women—Malays, Dayaks, and Chinese—who worked as domestic help. It was ‘a matter of convenience’ according to him, since most of these men subsequently married Indian women. He noted that European staff also had informal relationships with local women.

⁷⁶ Although Brunei reverted to being a British protectorate after the war, the Indians made no distinction between British guardianship and colonial rule of Brunei.

⁷⁷ Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, p. xiv.

⁷⁸ Ibid, p. 158

⁷⁹ Hussainmiya, B. A., Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin III and Britain: The Making of Brunei Darussalam, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1995Google Scholar, Chapter 5; Stockwell, A. J., ‘Britain and Brunei, 1945–1963: Imperial Retreat and Royal Ascendancy’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 38 (4), 2004CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁰ Harun Majid corroborates this in his study of the Brunei rebellion: ‘There are estimates that about 80% of the country's young men—many of them unemployed—were involved in the Uprising. If this is true, then almost every family participated in one way or another.’ Majid, H. A., Rebellion in Brunei: The 1962 Revolt, Imperialism, Confrontation and Oil, I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2007, p. 98Google Scholar.

⁸¹ See Cleary, M. and Wong, S. Y., Oil, Economic Development and Diversification in Brunei Darussalam, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1994CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 26.

⁸² Ibid.

⁸³ Hussainmiya, Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin III and Britain, p. 311.

⁸⁴ The Chinese in Brunei are not included in the designation ‘other’ but are categorized separately even though they too are not granted citizenship easily. Interestingly, although official histories acknowledge the contribution of Chinese labour in Brunei, Brunei-Indian narratives elide the role of the local Chinese in the building of Seria's oilfields and the moderninzing project.

⁸⁵ Comaroff, J. L. and Comaroff, J., Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Westview Press, Boulder, 1992, p. 34Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ The social geography of Seria reflected and reaffirmed the Company hierarchy. The town was organized around a grid where distinctive enclaves of housing and recreation were marked for the Company's senior staff (for all purposes European), the regional staff, and labour. Within these enclaves, there were further divisions that signified an employee's rank in the Company.

⁸⁷ For a discussion of colonial native mimicry, see Bhabha, H., The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ Tsing, A. L., Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005, p. 4Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ Ibid, p. 5.

⁹⁰ Pratt, M. L., Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 7Google Scholar.