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  3. Global South Asians

This series explores the distinctive contributions made by migrants from the Indian subcontinent to world history in the modern era. Placing the achievements of labourers, traders, thinkers and activists at the centre of the analysis, it examines a range of important economic, political, and cultural activities. By highlighting the agency of South Asians, the series seeks to craft new narratives of globalization that reshape our understanding of the modern world.

  • Series Editors: Crispin Bates, University of Edinburgh
  • Editorial Boards: Sunil Amrith, Yale University, Connecticut, Subho Basu, McGill University, Montréal, Marina Carter, University of Edinburgh, Joya Chatterji, Trinity College, Cambridge, Maurits S. Hassankhan, Anton de Kom Universiteit van Suriname, Ashutosh Kumar, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, Andrea Major, University of Leeds, Rajesh Rai, National University of Singapore, Goolam Vahed, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

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10 results in Global South Asians

Voices from Calcutta
  • Indian Indenture in the Age of Abolition
  • Purba Hossain
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • Between 1837 and 1920, 1.3 million indentured labourers migrated from India to sugar plantation colonies in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. Voices from Calcutta shows how spokesmen from Calcutta – the capital of British India – disrupted this trade and influenced the lives of these migrants. It follows Calcuttans in their journey of debating, investigating and defending indenture, unfolding a complex web of letters, petitions, interviews and investigative-reports. As the indenture debates influenced lived experience on ships and plantations, and shaped the negotiation of subjecthood and labour rights for the empire's peripatetic labourers, they became a means by which elite Calcuttans negotiated their own position within the empire. This book locates in Calcutta voices of protest that fundamentally defined the contours of post-slavery labouring across the British Empire. Instead of simply emanating from Britain, to be dutifully followed in the colonies, labour legislation was informed by voices from those very colonies.

In the Malay World
  • A Spatial History of a Bengali Transnational Community
  • Gazi Mizanur Rahman
  • Published online:
    28 November 2024
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • Based on various archival and non-archival records, oral testimonies and travel accounts, some of which are used for the first time, this book explores the historical migration of Bengalis and their diasporic experiences in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, covering a period from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Despite the tremendous historical mobility of the Bengalis in the Malay world and their contemporary salience, as reflected in the region's more-than-a-million-strong Bengali diaspora, their historical contribution remains almost unseen. This book addresses this lacuna by exploring the connections between Bengal and Malaya. The book further examines the formation of a Bengali social, political, economic and cultural space within the diverse South Asian diaspora during the colonial and postcolonial periods. The study contributes to the recent flourishing of mobility studies, cosmopolitanism, ethnic studies, connected histories and transnational histories in modern Asia.

A Clash of Color
  • Dialogues on Race, Caste, and Solidarity in the United States and India
  • Avinash Hingorani
  • Published online:
    28 November 2024
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • The marginalization of Black Americans due to white supremacy and the oppression of Indians under British colonialism featured inescapable similarities. At the turn of the twentieth century, these parallels led Indian and Black nationalists, intellectuals, and activists to share their experiences and engage in dialogues towards improving the social status of their people. Specifically, Black internationalists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, and Paul Robeson studied the Indian independence movement, and came to regard India as a template in the fight against white supremacy in the US. Similarly various Indians including Rabindranath Tagore, Lala Lajpat Rai, B. R. Ambedkar, and Taraknath Das theorized crucial parallels between race, colonialism and caste when studying the experiences of Black Americans. This book analyzes how they came together in their desire to overthrow the structures that subjugated them.

Girmitiyas and the Global Indian Diaspora
  • Origins, Memories, and Identity
  • Edited by Ashutosh Kumar, Crispin Bates
  • Published online:
    20 April 2024
    Print publication:
    04 July 2024
  • Many Indians journeyed out of India to supplant the loss of slave labour in the former European plantation colonies of Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji, and the Caribbean from the early nineteenth century onwards. This book aims to highlight the careers of these migrants who served as vital agents in building the global society of the twenty-first century. It explores the transformative experiences of those who migrated, and the memories of those who did not return after expiration of their contracts but chose instead to stay in their respective host countries. It describes the many challenges they faced — ageing in a society far from home, the loss of their formal Indian identity after Indian independence, their efforts to preserve a sense of community in the post-independence societies of South Africa and the Caribbean, and their adapting to the new political and social realities they faced as minorities in the countries in which their ancestors had adventurously determined to settle and live.

Beyond Indenture
  • Agency and Resistance in the Colonial South Asian Diaspora
  • Edited by Crispin Bates
  • Published online:
    31 December 2023
    Print publication:
    04 July 2024
  • Beyond Indenture brings together original essays by a mix of experienced and upcoming scholars. They reflect, as far as possible, the viewpoints and voices of indentured Indians who exercised agency, resisted and manipulated the colonial labour system to their advantage, and went on to build new lives for themselves overseas following the expiry of their contracts. Some remigrated to other colonies to earn a better wage and escape from debt and other burdens. Among those who chose to remain, women played a prominent role in the struggle for rights, freedom and opportunities, achieving them in ways which often defied or redefined South Asian customs and traditions. Alongside the migrant labourers, 'passenger Indians' made their way to the sugar, tea and rubber colonies, and became clerks, teachers and shopkeepers. After independence, the Indian communities overseas faced newer problems, not least of which were discrimination and marginalisation. Some were forced to return home. Others built upon the experience of struggles in the colonial era to collectively mobilise. Another theme explored is that of the broad alliances of diasporic Indians and Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants who have been recently enabled by the internet to connect with each other and to reconnect with the countries from which they originated.

Passages through India
  • Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890–1940
  • Somak Biswas
  • Published online:
    30 June 2023
    Print publication:
    21 September 2023
  • Passages Through India offers a study of the phenomenon of Western Indophilia: romanticised engagements around Hindu ideas of India. It argues that affective practices cultivated between major Indian guru-figures (Gandhi, Tagore and Vivekananda) and their white disciples serviced a larger politics of respectability, tied to exigencies of Indian cultural and nationalist politics. Indophile deployments in transnational projects like the abolition of indentured labour and global Hinduism, while anti-colonial, were not quite emancipatory. Such deployments – in Africa, America, Fiji and India – frequently reproduced deep hierarchies around race, class, caste and gender. Unifying distinct strands of western discipleship within a shared tradition of Indophilia, Passages Through India offers a new methodological framework that situates self and subjectivity as central to processes of global mobility and migration.

Uncivil Liberalism
  • Labour, Capital and Commercial Society in Dadabhai Naoroji's Political Thought
  • Vikram Visana
  • Published online:
    27 September 2022
    Print publication:
    10 November 2022
  • Uncivil Liberalism studies how ideas of liberty from the colonized South claimed universality in the North. Recovering the political theory of Dadabhai Naoroji, India's pre-eminent liberal, this book offers an original global history of this process by focussing on Naoroji's pre-occupation with social interdependence and civil peace in an age of growing cultural diversity and economic inequality. It shows how Naoroji used political economy to critique British liberalism's incapacity for civil peace by linking periods of communal rioting in colonial Bombay with the Parsi minority's economic decline. He responded by innovating his own liberalism, characterized by labour rights, economic republicanism and social interdependence maintained by freely contracting workers. Significantly, the author draws attention to how Naoroji seeded 'Western' thinkers with his ideas as well as influencing numerous ideologies in colonial and post-colonial India. In doing so, the book offers a compelling argument which reframes Indian 'nationalists' as global thinkers.

Citizens of Everywhere
  • Indian Women, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism, 1920–1952
  • Rosalind Parr
  • Published online:
    06 August 2021
    Print publication:
    09 December 2021
  • Citizens of Everywhere traces the international careers of a cohort of extraordinary Indian women leaders during the final decades of colonial rule. Working in pursuit of the dual goals of Indian independence and women's rights, the women featured in this book established productive transnational connections to gain influence on the world stage, all against the backdrop of momentous events in India and beyond. In doing so, they contributed a distinct set of ideas to global conversations about rights and citizenship. By bringing this transnational activism to light, the author offers new perspectives on Indian nationalism. More broadly the book establishes Indian women as actors in the global histories of women's rights and international movements during the era of decolonisation.

The Indentured Archipelago
  • Experiences of Indian Labour in Mauritius and Fiji, 1871–1916
  • Reshaad Durgahee
  • Published online:
    06 August 2021
    Print publication:
    09 December 2021
  • This book focuses on the spatial experiences of Indian indentured labourers in Mauritius and Fiji and reveals previously unexplored labour movements across the so-called Indentured Archipelago. It offers a historical geographical perspective of the lives of these labourers in Mauritius and Fiji, situating their experiences in the wider context of spatial mobility and subaltern agency. The concept of re-migration - labourers moving between these colonies, and beyond - is explored, and the scale of this facet of indentured life is revealed, in a way which has not been done to date. It brings to the fore a debate on subaltern agency, and role of geography in exploring the lives of these labourers both within and between colonies. The book also brings to light the numerous proposals for the use of Indian indentured labour across the globe, highlighting the centrality of Indian indenture to the post-abolition labour discourse.

Fleeting Agencies
  • A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya
  • Arunima Datta
  • Published online:
    31 December 2020
    Print publication:
    05 August 2021
  • Fleeting Agencies disrupts the male-dominated narratives by focusing on gendered patterns of migration and showing how South Asian women labour migrants engaged with the process of migration, interacted with other migrants and negotiated colonial laws. This is the first study of Indian coolie women in British Malaya to date. In exploring the politicization of labour migration trends and gender relations in the colonial plantation society in British Malaya, the author foregrounds how the migrant Indian 'coolie' women manipulated colonial legal and administrative perceptions of Indian women; their gender-prescriptive roles, relations within patriarchal marriage institutions, and even the emerging Indian national independence movement in India and Malaya. All this, to ensure their survival, escape from unfavourable relations and situations, and improve their lives. The book also introduces the concept of situational or fleeting agency, which contributes to further a nuanced understanding of agency in the lives of Indian coolie women.