Kala Pani Research Articles

The Gallows of Girmit (1886–1919)

ABSTRACT Little is known about capital punishment in Fiji in the context of indenture. This paper examines cases of condemned Indians who migrated as indentured labourers (girmitiyas). It compiles and analyses statistics and accounts pertaining to crimes of murder and the penalty of execution from 1886 to 1919. When these data are situated within a relevant social, historical, and cultural context, it becomes possible to dispel colonial myths about condemned girmitiyas. My intention is not to condone the act of murder, but to understand how this crime was triggered by interlocking social, cultural, and circumstantial factors. Indian patriarchal ideologies and stereotypes, displacement resulting from the journey across the kala pani (black water), unsatisfactory living conditions, the struggle to maintain a stable family life, exploitation by overseers and sardars, and feuds among Europeans and wealthy Indians are some root causes of homicide and ‘wife-murder’ during the years of indenture. The article concludes with glimpses of condemned Indian reactions to the sentence of death.

ASSESSING AUDIENCE RESPONSE TOWARDS COLORIZATION OF ICONIC BLACK-AND-WHITE BOLLYWOOD FILMS

In cinema, colors have significance on various levels, including the physical, psychological, and aesthetic. But adding color to black-and-white films so that they appear realistic to the majority of human observers was a significant challenge for the film industry in the 1980s, as it was a very difficult and time-consuming process. However, with the advancement of artificial intelligence and technical developments, the process of colorization has improved, which makes it possible to turn black-and-white films into vivid experiences in a matter of hours. Colorization performs by transferring out the luminance or scalar value, stored in each pixel of a B&W image to a three-dimensional color space.The objective of this research is to assess the reception of colorized versions of iconic black-and-white Bollywood films by contemporary audiences, particularly the younger generation. By employing a mixed methods approach that combines both qualitative and quantitative techniques, we explore whether the introduction of color through digital technology and recent artificial intelligence motivates the new generation to engage with these venerable classics.As case studies, five well-known Bollywood movies from various genres—Mughal-e-Azam (1960), Shree 420 (1955), Naya Daur (1957), Kala Pani (1958), and Dil Tera Deewana (1983)—were chosen. Short video montages featuring scenes from both the colorized and original black-and-white versions of these films were presented to undergraduate and postgraduate students at a university. Nonprobability purposive sampling was used to acquire the data, and a mixed-methods strategy was used to analyze it. The results show that colorization has a substantial effect on younger viewers, who have a greater desire to see these movies in color. This study highlights the evolving importance of colorization in preserving classic cinema and reviving its appeal to modern audiences. Although not devoid of controversies, the process of colorization has emerged as a means to bridge the generational gap in the appreciation of cinematic legacy.

Tanty feminisms

A geneaology of Caribbean feminism is a geneaology of tanty feminisms. Occupying numerous articulations throughout the history of the Caribbean region and its diasporas, the figure of the ‘tanty’, or ‘aunty’ as they are known in non-Caribbean contexts, and the consequential amital social relations they produce have been indispensable to contemporary discourses and practices of Caribbean feminist thought and praxis. The tanty cannot be read as indebted to a singular person, figure or monolithic legacy but operates as a fluid and transnational force of Caribbean feminist knowing that instructs us through non-normative embodied transgressions, and pedagogies of free up. Yet, despite their presence of vital integrity to Caribbean popular culture, community organizing, history, politics and literature, discussions of the politics and pedagogies of tantyhood remain underrepresented in scholarly Caribbean feminist literatures. In this article, I reflect upon my creative practice as a drag artist and self-proclaimed tanty in an annual digital photography series I have produced over the last three years entitled ‘Coolieween’. In this work, I reference Indo-/Caribbean folklore and mythologies, and stories of horror, the grotesque and the paranormal as entangled with queer affects, embodiments and aesthetics. Drag artistry, which, like tantyhood, agitates the invisible boundaries of neo-colonial gender, racial and sexual binaries, provides a critical feminist terrain to metaphorize the institutional crossings of pain and pleasure held within historical and contemporary ontologies of Indo-Caribbeanness. Investigating the pedagogy of this crossing is central to understanding, as well as critiquing, long-standing attachments of pain, injury, pathologization and trauma that have been commonly scripted to Indo-Caribbean subjectivities, often in reference to genealogies of kala pani poetics and other diaspora narratives that have sutured ideas of Indo-Caribbeanness as always-already broken, fragmented and dislocated. In this article, I instead centre paradigms of erotics and pleasure as a transformative medium to turn our optics towards transformative reconfigurations of Indo-Caribbean feminist selfhoods. As I argue here, by thinking with and through tanty feminisms, we are provided with intergenerational and transnational languages of unsettling logic that continually instruct us through everyday modalities of Indo-Caribbean feminist living and being.

Words on Black Water: Setting South African “Plantation Literature” Afloat on the Kala Pani

This essay challenges the historiography of indenture in South Africa for its focus on land and schemas of belonging, which do not attend sufficiently to the opacity and fluidity that crossing the Kala Pani entailed. Crossing of the “opaque” ocean invited the re-invention for lower and middle-class indentees, literally inserting them into different life-worlds. The Kala Pani had the effect of a magician’s black box, a space for transfiguration, of aspiration and mobility outside of the terrestrial strictures of castes ordained by birth and maintained by village communities. If one were to centre analyses that focus on this oceanic crossing and its transformations of self and other, rather than its elision, this would necessitate a literary focus on individual stories of indenture, where the idiosyncratic transformations exist alongside the more familiar narratives of community. In this vein, the last part of the essay suggests a reading of Aziz Hassim’s book Revenge of Kali (2009) as a potentially revelatory form, to which pluviality and its cultural histories are central.

Kala pani revisited: Indian labour migrants and the sea crossing

This article examines the reconstruction and deconstruction of the concept of काला पानी or kālā pānā, meaning the ‘black waters’, which all Indians must cross when migrating overseas. From its origin as a Brahmanic text warning about the dangers of oceanic voyages, through its dissemination as a more generalised stricture against emigration and its use and abuse as a British colonial construction, to its recasting as a historical trope and a literary device, the ever-changing influence and meaning of kala pani is interrogated and assessed. Contextualising the kala pani trope against the setting of sepoy, convict and indentureship voyages, this study also evaluates its historical validity and importance in colonial and nationalist realities. Finally, the symbolic value of the kala pani and its reworking as a literary device are explored.

History in the Attic: Search for Roots in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge

In most of diaspora literature there is an attempt to retrieve the past. This makes one measure time in many ways, different calendars, change of seasons, past encounters narrated through wars, defeats, encounters and disasters. It is remembered through family history, ancestral heritage, nostalgia, memory and even through national disasters. This interaction portrays the immigrants caught in flight of memories, relationships and images. The relocation has its disgust for one thing or the other. The author has to live in the reminiscences, a collective memory representing a symbolic relationship between past and present. The Swinging Bridge by Ramabai Espinet chronicles the multiple exiles that are part of the Indian experience in the Caribbean and Canada through two figures one from the past- great grandmother Gainder and the other from the present - Mona, the protagonist. The novel commemorates the maternal roots and routes of Indo-Caribbean history by establishing the subjectivity of widows and young girls from India who crossed the Kala Pani (Black waters of the Atlantic) in search of new beginnings in Trinidad and the great-grand-daughter who engages in an existential quest for selfhood in Canada. Grief motivates a flood of personal memories as Mona begins to remember intimate details of family life that had been repressed under the cover of migration. Bits and pieces of the past, fragments scattered in various places, childhood memories, overheard conversations, prayer songs, all come together in the attic. She explores the secret songs, photographs and letters giving her a powerful voice for her culture, her family, her fellow women and for herself. Mona’s drive to document history enables her to reveal the family’s carefully guarded secrets- domestic violence, drunken rampages, sexual abuse, illegitimate children, and even AIDS. This paper seeks to analyse the novel’s diasporic contents and find out whether this attempt at retrieval of the past brings about a change in the perception of today’s generation. The author brings to light the problems of a plural society calling for need for relationships and need for mutual respect- all to avoid conflict situations through this effective tracing of history in the novel.

Migritude and Kala Pani Routes in Shumona Sinha’s Assommons les pauvres (Let Us Strike Down the Poor)

The term migritude was first coined by French theorist Jacques Chevrier to characterize “extracontinental” francophone sub-Saharan literatures that have their roots in negritude and immigration. Kenyan cultural artist Shailja Patel later expanded the term to include South Asian “migrants with attitude.” This article further expands the current framings of migritude by linking it to the historical movement of kala pani, or nineteenth-century Indian indenture. The idea of kala pani migritude reveals an engagement with clandestine migration, identity, language, translation, and geography, both rooted in France and routed along treacherous seaways. Shumona Sinha’s novel Assommons les pauvres also focuses on the experiences of the privileged immigrant narrator whose story is a core part of the novel. Sinha has the privilege to narrate the stories of the migrants for them in her coveted role as a translator. Her stories are mediated by her ambivalence toward the migrants, for whom she feels shame and disgust, and her own tentative attempts to assimilate Frenchness as a normative ideal. This article offers a contrapuntal reading of Sinha’s novel through the lens of kala pani migritude to determine whether migrant subjectivity in a mediated narrative is an ultimately temporary, fleeting, or failed act.

Decolonizing International Relations: A Re-Memory of Indentured Servitude in Fiji and How it Impacts Our Present and Future

In response to the fourth coup in the Fiji Islands in as many as seventeen years, the international community demanded the restoration of democracy and order in the country. Historical memories of a British colonialism that brought Indians to Fiji as indentured laborers and proceeded to construct a ‘museum’ for the Euro-American imagination that resulted in such tumultuous conditions in Fiji are conveniently cast aside in a colonial globality masquerading as “liberal international order.” These memories, histories beyond the Western construct of the nation-state, histories of colonialism, are also missing from dominant discourses of realism, liberalism, constructivism and historical materialism. The case of Fiji serves as an example of a ‘postcolonial’ nation-state that current academic IR theory cannot offer much support to since it has a colonial epistemology, shackled and bounded within the confines of the Western-constructed nation-state system. Hence, this paper will shed the secure and comfortable land of the Euro-American, travel down the kala pani (Pacific) waters, and shipwreck on Vanua Levu, one of the many islands in the archipelago of Fiji, as the first Indian indentured laborers did when they were taken from one part of the British empire to another. In a place that is romanticized as paradise in the Euro-American imagination, we will pull back the curtains of the imagined museum and reveal a ‘post-colonial’ nation struggling with export-oriented dependent development while burning in the flames of ethnic-tensions created by the then British Empire and sustained today by a colonial globality. This colonial globality is emulated by the modern nation-state, in which differences are created and otherized, sustained within national spaces and across the inter-national. It is the crucial intervention of historical memory pertaining to the construction of the nation-state and the inter-national that makes possible this Discovery. We propose decolonizing IR through critique where the voices and histories subaltern to IR, but so crucial to the production of the local, the national and therefore, global, are put back on the agenda, which should ultimately provide for more honest and responsible scholarship.

Kala Pani: Aesthetic Deathscapes and the Flow of Water after Indenture

This article focuses on the kala pani (dark waters) as a deathscape particular to indentured labourers and their descendants. Following a historical discussion of representations of the kala pani, the author turns to contemporary artists Maya Mackrandilal and Andil Gosine to explore how their artistic engagements are rerouting the flows of the kala pani away from discourses of caste stigma or the finality of (social) death to a reckoning of past and future time for those living in the diasporic space of North America.

ACROSS THE KALA PANI: UNTOLD STORIES OF INDENTURED INDIAN WOMEN OF CHRISTIAN ORIGIN IN SOUTH AFRICA

The indenture experience is one that is entrenched in the very being of the Indian community in South Africa. Recent times have seen a good spread of documentation on such experiences, especially in light of the 150th anniversary of the arrivals in South Africa, celebrated in 2010. What does become clear in such accounts, however, is that the experiences of women are subsumed within such historical records, therefore giving little or no attention to their voices. Indian women were hugely impacted by the indenture experience; however, these accounts are few and far between. The history of Indian women in South Africa is undoubtedly largely shaped by their experiences of indenture. Such history is encompassed within their trajectories of poverty, culture, education and religion as they took the courageous decision to cross the Kala Pani. In this short account, the indenture experience of the Indians in South Africa will be examined, giving specific attention to the aspect of poverty and the impact of mission on Indian Christian women. Various scholars briefly make mention of such experiences, however, it becomes important to apportion intentional spaces to those once muted, yet significant voices. Indentured Indian women of Christian origin have a story to tell – a story of their encounters across the Kala Pani. Such stories become important to the discourse of the history of the Indian community in South Africa.

Bridges Beyond the <i>Kala Pani</i>: Transgressing Boundaries in Mootoo and Espinet

Until recently, the kala pani or “dark waters” navigated by Indian subjects indentured and shipped to locations in the Caribbean remained largely unexplored. In the past decade, the fiction of authors such as Ramabai Espinet and Shani Mootoo, as well as scholarship by Brinda Mehta, Shalini Puri, M. Jacqui Alexander, and others, has begun to excavate Indo-Caribbean experience as well as to chart paths from places such as Trinidad to locations in the North, especially Canada. In considering issues of citizenship and belonging, texts by Espinet and Mootoo offer insights into both the enduring borders that attempt to shore up norms of gender and sexuality and the ways that non-conforming subjects may build bridges to more inclusive concepts of citizenship. This essay discusses Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge (2003) and Mootoo’s novel Valmiki’s Daughter (2008) through the lens of transgressive sexualities that seek spaces of belonging beyond the dark seas of normativity and taboo. In both texts, lies and repression mark the lives of Indo-Caribbean men who desire other men. Both texts emphasize spatial arrangements, specifically houses and property in Trinidad, to examine issues of territory, citizenship, and nation for Indo-Caribbean subjects and to challenge borders that maintain normative identities as they label “perverse” and “unnatural” those whose desires blur such boundaries. In particular, women who desire other women, as seen in Mootoo’s novel, pose a powerful challenge to established order and prescribed roles. The essay explores the transgressive potential of such rebellions, which aim to cross and blur identities of race and gender as well as sexuality. Further, the essay addresses the following questions: If belonging necessitates a lack of freedom, what does free choice entail? What stepping stones might form the bridge to full citizenship?

Inscribing kala pani in Ernest Moutoussamy's A la recherche de l'Inde perdue

This essay examines the trope of indianité in Ernest Moutoussamy's collection of poems A la recherché de l'Inde perdue. These poems focus on the Indian crossing of the black waters of the Atlantic popularly known as kala pani, the trauma of exile and displacement, interrogations of identity in the Caribbean islands, as well as the important presence of women who were an integral, albeit minority, constituency in this migrating labor diaspora. Moutoussamy establishes the primacy of the female voice to show how kala pani women negotiated the oceanic crossings from India to Guadeloupe in literature. These poems highlight the ‘jahaji bahin principle’, an ethos of diasporic sisterhood and subjectivity created by the women. I will also show how the intersections between memory, gender, and the oceanic crossing represent exilic tropes that engender a feminized reading of indianité in Moutoussamy's work.

Crossing the Kala Pani: Cause for “Celebration” or “Commemoration” 150 Years on? Portrayals of Indenture in Recent South African Writing

Summary In 2010, the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the first indentured labourers from India brought across the Indian Ocean – the kala pani – on the SS Truro in 1860, was marked in a variety of ways by the descendants of those original pioneers. One of the many letters to the press during last year asked whether cultural organisations should be “celebrating” or “commemorating” this anniversary given the harsh conditions under which indentured labour was carried out. This article picks up on this point – to “celebrate” or “commemorate”? – by seeking to assess how the topic of indenture is handled in the local press and also in fictional works of selected contemporary South African writers of Indian descent; for example, Neelan Govender's Girrmit Tales (2008), Rubendra Govender's Sugar Cane Boy (2008), Aziz Hassim's Revenge of Kali (2009) among others. These titles are all recent additions to what could be called a South African plantation literature which is flourishing at present in local writing circles, given perhaps the 150th anniversary mentioned above, but also given a coming of age for South African Indian fiction post apartheid.

<em>Health and Medicine at Sea, 1700––1900</em>, edited by David Boyd Haycock and Sally Archer

Reviewed by: Health and Medicine at Sea, 1700-1900 Isaac Land (bio) Health and Medicine at Sea, 1700-1900, edited by David Boyd Haycock and Sally Archer; pp. xiv + 229. Woodbridge and Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2009, £55.00, $95.00. This volume shows how ship's surgeons learned to pinpoint the causes of high mortality rates and to impose shipboard regimes that—if applied consistently—would measurably improve the odds of survival. The contributors represent different disciplinary backgrounds ranging across naval history, medical history, and the history of seaborne migration (voluntary and otherwise). By juxtaposing accounts of medical practices on slave trade ships, on Royal Navy vessels, on Australian transports, and on Kala Pani voyages carrying indentured workers from South Asia, this book demonstrates that contemporaries were well aware of the lessons learned and techniques perfected in other branches of maritime endeavor. After an uneven and gradual process of amelioration, these techniques yielded impressive results by the 1850s, when ten percent of emigrant ships arriving in Australia did so without losing a single passenger and two-thirds of the ships lost no more than five people in the course of the voyage. That Victorian success story, however, appears here as the refinement or culmination of a host of much earlier initiatives including the navy's fight against scurvy and the efforts of several generations of slave ship owners to lower the death rate and boost their profits on the Middle Passage. Overall, the essays reveal continuity—rather than jarring changes or abrupt transitions—between the Victorian decades and the period that preceded them. Without explicitly articulating this as a goal, Health and Medicine at Sea [End Page 546] works to undermine facile dichotomies between the Age of Sail and the subsequent Age of Steam. Likewise, this book helps us see that what is sometimes called, a bit derisively, the Old Navy was far from indifferent to innovative methods. A broader discussion of the navy's investments in new technology would have been illuminating here. Before textile workers found themselves reorganized into the modern factory, the navy was constructing gigantic brick buildings for rope making on an industrial scale. It was also the navy that spanned shipyards with vast roofs of corrugated iron before that technique had been adopted in the construction of train stations. Indeed, the train stations turned to retired naval officers to supervise operations, because these men already had a respect for clockwork regularity. The navy's interest in precise scientific instrumentation had been refined by eighteenth-century controversies about the exact freezing temperature of sea water and the best way to determine longitude at sea. The navy applied a similar inquisitive and experimental approach to matters of diet and provisioning. New theories about the chemistry of digestion resulted in the manufacture of the world's first carbonated beverages as a possible remedy for scurvy. The challenges of preserving food on lengthy Arctic expeditions led to the invention of the tin can, although, to the consternation of the expedition members, foresight failed to suggest the need to simultaneously invent the can opener. With all this in mind, the achievements featured in this volume seem less surprising or unique. Navy funds sponsored medical research projects on the relationship between diet and disease in the fleet, gathering statistics and instituting some of the first modern clinical trials. The subject of study could be as elementary as whether serving broth to sick sailors made a difference or not, but once refined, this methodology could be applied to other problems and the published results made part of the permanent public record, where later generations would debate their meaning in journals like the Lancet. The formal study of tropical diseases also grew out of problems involved with treating sailors in those climates, an expensive endeavor; for example, the Sick and Hurt Board found that it had spent 400,000 in one 1795 accounting, primarily on illnesses contracted in the East and West Indies. Thus, the navy's drive to improve survival rates at sea resulted in predictable educational innovations such as the Regius Chair of Military Surgery at the University of Edinburgh, but also in the creation of the London School of...

The <i>Kala Pani</i> Connection: Francophone Migration Narratives in the Caribbean Writing of Raphaël Confiant and the Mauritian Writing of Ananda Devi

The <i>Kala Pani</i> Connection: Francophone Migration Narratives in the Caribbean Writing of Raphaël Confiant and the Mauritian Writing of Ananda Devi

Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge

Research Article| October 01 2006 Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge Brinda Mehta Brinda Mehta Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Small Axe (2006) 10 (3): 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1215/-10-3-19 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Brinda Mehta; Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge. Small Axe 1 October 2006; 10 (3): 19–36. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-10-3-19 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSmall Axe Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Small Axe Incorporated2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge

Engendering History: A Poetics of the <i>Kala Pani</i> in Ramabai Espinet's <i>The Swinging Bridge</i>

Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge

Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge

Across the Kala Pani: An introduction

(1998). Across the Kala Pani: An introduction. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 21, Across The Kala Pani: Indian Overseas Migration and Settlement, pp. 1-18.

Understanding the Indian indenture experience*

(1998). Understanding the Indian indenture experience. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 21, Across The Kala Pani: Indian Overseas Migration and Settlement, pp. 215-237.