Introduction

Abstract

This chapter attempts a theorisation of the troubled black waters with coolitude as its key structural plinth. The Kala pani, the Black Waters, was both existential as well as a code for surveillance, a reminder of the coolies’ wretched state. As an existential absolute—and this is its theoretical value—in the girmit imaginary (imaginaire), it acquired considerable ideological traction as a transgressive act, a kind of threshold that one never crossed or entered into, even though in its Hindu, ‘sastric’ definition it applied narrowly only to the ‘twice born’ caste or varṇa. The distinction between the two is important for Torabully because of the quite specific historical experience embedded in coolitude. Crossing the Kala pani, the tempestuous waters vividly described in the opening pages of the Mauritian Hindi novelist Abhimanyu Anat's Lal Pasina (‘Bloody Sweat’), meant loss of caste and Torabully offers this as a universal fear.