‘Hill Coolies’: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination, 1836–38

Abstract

This paper uses debates about Indian migrant labour that took place in New South Wales in 1836–38 to problematize enduring tropes about indenture and the ‘typical’ Indian labour migrant, which have their roots in British anti-slavery discourse of the late 1830s. By juxtaposing abolitionist assumptions against ongoing debates about Indian labour migration in other parts of the British Empire, it explores the economic, political, and moral/ideological imperatives that underpinned the representation of indenture during this formative period. By placing metropolitan British anti-indenture literature alongside arguments for Indian migration made by settlers from the Australian periphery of empire, it explores the ways in which racial, imperial, and commercial discourses intersected in the representation of the so-called ‘hill coolie’ as the quintessential Indian labour migrant. In doing so, it seeks to destabilize persistent representations of the Indian migrant as passive victim of indenture and suggest a more complex set of identities and interactions.