Gendered migrations: a comparative study of indentured and non-indentured immigrants to South Africa 1860–1930

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the desire for cheap labour in the British colonies led to the settlement of both indentured and free Indian communities in Fiji, the Caribbean, Mauritius and South Africa. In South African historiography, the lives of indentured and “passenger” or Free Indian women have often been analysed as two separate entities, given their migration status. This article compares and contrasts the lived experiences of these two groups of immigrant women, who came from the Indian sub-continent in the context of gender, ethnicity, mobility, agency, identity and regional affiliation. By contrasting these two categories of women from the Indian sub-continent, this study seeks to demonstrate how the concepts of difference and intersectionality can enhance our understanding of migratory experiences and that migratory experiences of female immigrants cannot be essentialized or homogenized. This paper makes a valuable contribution to understanding the gender dynamics of migration from the Indian sub-continent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.