The Invisibility of Eurasian Female Domestic Migrant Labourers in Britain

At the outset of this chapter, I would like to clarify that the term ‘Eurasian’ to identify ‘biracial’ people or people of mixed racial descent (Euro-Asian) was in general use throughout the Victorian Age. It was replaced by the term ‘Anglo- Indian’ in 1911, when members of the community in India made it known through their leaders that they would prefer to be labelled as such in order to distinguish them from the mixed-race offspring of colonials based in other parts of Asia and the Far East. After India’s Independence in 1947, the community was more categorically defined in Article 366(2) of the Constitution of India as the progeny of European fathers and Indian mothers domiciled in India (then British India, now among the territories of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh). The perplexing issue of their nomenclature attains significance for the simple reason that they were often erroneously classified: as ‘Europeans’ when in India and as ‘Indians’ or ‘Asiatics’ when outside the colony. Rarely were they correctly labelled as ‘Eurasians’ or ‘Anglo-Indians’ – a matter that makes it challenging to isolate them as a distinct ethnic community among Indians and has added to their invisibility. Indeed, as much as India’s people of mixed racial descent are ‘invisible’ in the South Asian diaspora as immigrants in Great Britain today, so too had they remained uncounted among labour forces in England during the decades of the British Raj. The reasons for their ‘invisibility’ (as I have argued in my book on Britain’s Anglo-Indians2) are that they had European surnames (either Portuguese, French, Dutch or British, derived from their paternity) and anglicised first names, were 100 per cent Christian by religious affiliation, were either Roman Catholic or Anglican, and employed English as their mother tongue. They were also westernised in terms of dress and lifestyle. This combination of factors served to create the identity confusion that still plagues the community but also serves to single them out in photographs when depicted in diverse groups.

Difficult as it might be to identify people of mixed racial descent from the Indian subcontinent in the United Kingdom (UK) today, it is well-nigh impossible to ascertain their presence in the UK during the colonial era.

It had been well established by the 1920s that human and chimpanzee bloods were more similar to one another than horse and donkey bloods were. This was not particularly unfathomable, since humans and chimpanzees are rather similar, after all, but the special similarity of their blood was well known in educated circles at the time of the Tennessee “Monkey Trial” in 1925.

The similarity of the blood of humans and great apes remained an interesting fact until the 1960s, as the molecularization of biology was proceeding, and genes were shown to be linear instructions for the production of proteins, and proteins were shown to be long chains of amino acids. And when you painstakingly sequenced the 287 amino acids of human hemoglobin and gorilla hemoglobin, showed biochemist Emile Zuckerkandl in 1963, you found them to differ in only one or two places, for a difference of less than 1%.

This epilogue chapter draws on metaphors of opera to offer a layered meditation on recurrent themes, teleologies, and tropes of identity, exceptionalism, and authenticity – stated, reworked, subverted, abandoned, and resurrected in Cuban literary culture from the end of the nineteenth century into the third decade of the twenty-first. Revisiting such figures as José Martí, Julián del Casal, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, Lorenzo García Vega, Virgilio Piñera, Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and Antonio José Ponte, among others, and noting the writing of numerous literary women and men of different postrevolutionary generations who echo, mythologize, undermine, or shift directions from these legacies, the chapter asks that readers of Cuba’s cumulative literary history attune themselves to the performative voices through which this operatic literary history unfolds.

This book concerns what has been called the ‘first wave’ of Indians who travelled overseas to work on colonial plantations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a migration facilitated and supervised by the British colonial government of India under what became the indentured labour scheme. Under this scheme, workers would sign a contract, popularly known as a girmit, or agreement, which bound them to work for a single employer at a fixed wage for a fixed period of three–five years. Indentured migrants identified themselves with specific terms such as angaze in Mauritius, kontraki in Suriname and girmitiya in Fiji. However, the British commonly called them ‘coolies’ – a term already familiar to them from its usage in South India and China.

The indenture system was introduced to overcome the crisis that emerged from the banning of slavery in the British Empire by the British Parliament in 1833. The system attracted huge criticism and opposition from the very beginning; however, it continued until 1917 when it was finally abolished, under pressure from Indian nationalists and the greater importance of moving troops and supplies during the global conflict of World War I. Another reason was the crisis in the sugar industry as the production of sugar beet undermined the demand for plantation sugar cane in global markets.

This volume explores the transformative experiences of those who migrated, and the memories of those who did not return after expiration of their contract, but chose to stay in their respective host countries. These communities of South Asians abroad struggled to adapt to their new situations, standardizing the languages spoken and preserving some cultural and folk traditions, whilst discarding others (notably many of the distinctions of caste) – in short, forging for themselves entirely new identities as ‘diasporic Indians’.

Many books and essays concerning the history of Indian indentured migration in the colonial period begin with numbers. They attempt, with overused tropes, to generalize in a few lines the experience of labour migration across multiple destinations throughout the globe and a period of more than a century. However, the numbers themselves are uncertain. Many more millions of South Asians migrated without contracts of indenture as ‘free migrants’, otherwise known as ‘passenger Indians’. And many re-indentured, or re-migrated from colony to colony, without ever returning home (what Reshaad Durgahee has termed ‘subaltern careering’) – thus evading enumeration in official statistics.

Across centuries and continents, the Irish essay has captured impressions and insights triggered by socio-political transformations across the island, and the form’s malleability has allowed writers to puzzle out the contours of Irish identity, often highlighting its deliberate performativity. Shaped by the culture’s oral tradition, the Irish essay frequently imbricates with storytelling, theatrical performance, and public lectures, live events that underscore its performative qualities. Writers often gear their impressions and inquiries self-consciously to audiences real and imagined, assuming the essay plays a meaningful role in public dialogue. In the twenty-first century, personal and lyric essays focused on rapidly changing perceptions of bodies and sexuality exemplify this trait. This alertness to performance and audiences helps to explain the Irish essay’s ready adaptation to new forms, technologies, and platforms in pursuit of readers, listeners, and viewers at home and abroad.

A Hilbert space is specific example of a Banach space, because its norm comes from a scalar product. This particular norm makes the geometry of a Hilbert space very familiar to us. In particular, in a Hilbert space one can find a unique element of a closed, convex subset that minimizes the distance of this subset from a point lying outside of it. One can also think of projections of vectors on closed subspaces. Again, all this would have been impossible were the space with scalar product not complete. The chapter ends with remarkable example showing that conditional probability, one of the fundamental notions of probability theory, has much to do with projections in a Hilbert space.

This chapter examines alternative cultural projects that emerged in Cuba from the 1980s into the new millennium: intellectual groupings, periodicals, and writing initiatives neither fully in the state’s purview nor fully outside of it. The chapter elucidates the national and international factors as well as intellectual and artistic goals marking such projects as Paideia (1989–1990), Diáspora(s) (1993–c.2002), Torre de Letras (2001–2016), OMNI Zona Franca (1995–?), and la noria (2009–) and notes their impact on the writers of Generation Zero, born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who published some of their work in these venues. Although the chapter includes numerous writers, key figures addressed include Rolando Prats (Paideia); Reina María Rodríguez (Paideia and Torre de Letras); Rolando Sánchez Mejías, Carlos A. Aguilera, Ricardo Alberto Pérez, Pedro Marqués de Armas, and Rogelio Saunders (Diásporas); Juan Carlos Flores, Amaury Pacheco, David Escalona, Luis Eligio Pérez, Alina Guzmán, Nilo Julián González, Damián Valdés, and Jorge (Yoyi) Pérez (OMNI Zona Franca); and Oscar Cruz and José Ramón Sánchez (la noria).

Chapter 1 traces the antebellum faith in the non-finality of death and its antithesis in the irreparable change wrought by amputation. In sentimental theology, the dead are never wholly gone – they live on to inspire and save, awaiting reunion with those they leave behind. The dead child embodies the reality of unpredictability and at the same time operates within a narrative that soothes. The author contrasts antebellum postmortem photography and images of amputees and amputated limbs. Postmortem photography of children reinforces the sense that the family has not really been ruptured, that death isn’t really the end. Photographs of amputee Civil War soldiers do quite the opposite. Rather than operating as postmortem photography does, as a mediator between the living child, its dead body, and the family left behind, the portrait of the amputee is insistently in the present, even as the lost limb is consigned to an unrecuperable past. While nineteenth-century pictures of dead children often encouraged the fiction that the photograph’s subject was an ongoing member of the family, amputation photography – both medical and vernacular – insists on the permanence of bodily change.

Departing from a detailed examination of a new enthusiasm for the genre of science fiction among Cuban writers in the aftermath of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, this chapter analyzes major trends and themes in detective fiction, speculative fiction (including its subgenre cyberpunk), and graphic novels in the pre- and post post-1989 periods, along with their relationship to other bodies of knowledge and literary production, on the island and elsewhere. Through the examination of work by writers as diverse as José Miguel Sánchez (Yoss), Daína Chaviano, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Jorge Enrique Lage, and Arturo Infante, among several others, the chapter demonstrates how these writers not only register the changing temperatures of ideology, morality, and everyday realities in ways that challenge Cuban exceptionalism, but also project dreams for a better planet, less tempered by utopian discourses of the past.

Banach’s principle states that if a map T uniformly reduces the distance between points of a complete metric space, then there is a unique x such that Tx = x, called T’s fixed point. This simple statement has profound and surprising consequences, as we will see in the following chapters. For now, we will content ourselves with an example, which may appear to belong to the realm of linear algebra, but is, in fact, much easier to deal with using metric notions.

New research on the workings of the ‘web of empire’ have revealed that the British Empire was not only sustained by raw materials from India but depended significantly on its manpower working as ‘coolies’, or indentured labourers, in distant plantations in Mauritius, Fiji, West Indies, East and South Africa, and the Straits Settlements. The white dominions of Canada, Australia and the United States (US) similarly depended on low-paid labourers from the East for much of their work of opening up and colonising the prairie wastes. Initially, the bulk of migrants from India in North America came from among the strong and hard-working Sikhs of the Punjab province of India, who found it lucrative to work in these places, lured by the comparatively higher wages than they could obtain at home. However, as the market for labour became saturated by the first decade of the twentieth century, these countries began to erect legal barriers to the free entry of these Indian migrants under pressure from domestic workers, unwilling to face competition from migrants. This came as a great shock to migrant Indians, who had until then been thinking of the empire as a vast field of ‘shared opportunities’.

In 1908, Canada tried to exclude Indian migrant labour by legislation, which insisted on ‘continuous passage’ for entering into the ports of the country. This would automatically disable Sikh migrants, who had to change ships to reach Canada. Gurdit Singh’s attempt to charter a Japanese ship, Komagata Maru, in June 1914 to ensure continuous passage for the Sikh migrants to Canada was a challenge to this legal barrier against the migrants. The turning back of this ship from Vancouver shattered the belief of the migrants in an equal imperial citizenship, and it became incendiary material for the revolutionary nationalist propaganda of the Ghadr conspirators, based in San Francisco. Student radicals in Canada and America, such as Lala Har Dayal, Kartar Singh Sarabha, G. D. Kumar and Husain Rahim tried to contact radicals all over the world, in India House in the United Kingdom (UK), France, Egypt, Turkey and Switzerland, and tried to spread their message through journals, like the Ghadr and the Hindustanee from San Francisco and the Al Kasas from Egypt. They even linked their efforts with German imperialist conspirators to gain funding and guidance in their common mission against British imperialism.

Essayists have long reflected on the reasons for travel – its educational, cultural, and spiritual advantages – often (and uncritically) championing travel for its own sake. This chapter identifies the formal aspects of essayistic British travel writing in authorial perspective, thematic content, and publication format, tracking their change over time. It shows that the discursive and stylistic development of the British travel essay was closely bound up with the diversification of the periodical press and the expansion of the empire. Ultimately, it shows that essayists developed a more self-aware and critical attitude towards travelling, informed by a sense of geopolitical, ecological, and ethical responsibility.

This chapter tackles two additional activities of the pollster as fortune teller. The first is the assessment and prediction of government approval ratings. As we have already seen in Chapter 8, approval ratings are extremely important in predicting elections. There is both an art and science to the analysis of such measures. Here, we want to lay out an analytical framework which will allow pollsters to assess both structural and policy factors related to approval ratings and then how to utilize multiple methods to triangulate future outcomes. We will focus on the Biden administration circa August 2022. Ultimately, a fairly large component of a pollster’s workload is the continual assessment of government initiatives and their convergence (or not) with what people want.

The second is a discussion of more context-based analysis. The pollster has an important role in helping decision-makers understand the bigger picture. Here, broader demographic and social trends help gird such analysis.