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Abstract
In 1917, the United Provinces government in British India proscribed Lakshman Singh’s play titled Kuli Pratha arthat Biswin Shatbdi ki Gulami (The System of Recruiting Coolies, in other words, Slavery in the Twentieth Century), under the Indian Press Act of 1910. This essay analyzes Kuli Pratha’s proscription when indenture was an important issue on the nationalist agenda and shows that legal control of literature was shaped not only by issues within the subcontinent but also by British imperial policies and practices in the Empire’s colonial outposts beyond India. Analyzing the play in tandem with its proscription, its extra-legal contexts, and its official English translation that served to direct authorities about its political subject matter, thus, provides a layered understanding of the complicated entanglements of colonialism, nationalism, and literature.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The United Provinces (UP) during the British Raj was a region that broadly corresponds to what are now the states of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Thakur Lakshman Singh’s play appears in its Hindi version under this title in Satyendra Kumar Taneja’s edited collection, Sitam ki Intahaa Kya Hai? Saat Zabtshuda Hindi Natak (New Delhi: Rashtriya Natak Vidyalay, 2010), 147–222. The 1917 “Translation of a Book Named Coolie Pratha” calls it “Coolie Pratha (lit. Coolie System) or Slavery in the Twentieth Century.” (BLL IOR J&P 1917). The term “Coolie” has been up for debate. While it has been labeled a pejorative term, some scholars and descendants of indentured populations have reclaimed the word. As Gaiutra Bahadur, who tracks the history of women during indenture through her great-grandmother Sujaria’s story who boarded a ship in 1903 for Guyana, asserts in the “Preface” titled “The C-Word,” in Coolie Woman, The Odyssey of Indenture (Hurst and Company & University of Chicago Press, 2013), “A movement to reclaim the word coolie, to invest it with pride and subvert the old stigma, is at least a generation old” (xxi). She quotes the Guyanese poet Rajkumari Singh’s call to “Proclaim the word! Identify with the word! Proudly say to the world. I am a COOLIE” (xxi) and quotes Singh’s insistence that “the word must not be left to die out, buried or forgotten in the past. It must be given a new lease on life. All that they (indentured) did and we are doing and our progeny will do, must be stamped with the name COOLIE, lest posterity accuse us of not venerating the ancestors” (xxi). The date of the letter sent to the Government of the United Provinces regarding the proscription of the book (“with abstract in English”) was 19 January 1917. The other book title mentioned on this “Date of Letter” is Swadhin Bharat. Called a “leaflet” this also included an “abstract in English.” “List of Books Proscribed under the Indian Press Act, 1910.” From BLL IOR: L/PJ/6/1477. (In Folder 1461 J&P 701 to 885).
2 “Act No. I of 1910. Passed by the Governor General of India in Council. An Act to provide for the better control of the Press, 1-11. A1910-1.pdf (indiacode.nic.in).
3 Act No. 1 of 1910, 1.
4 Act No. 1 of 1910, 3.
5 BLL, IOR: L/PJ/6/1477.
6 Lakshman Singh was an accomplished Hindi writer. The play was republished in 2010 by the National School of Drama. The version I have analyzed in this essay is by Lakshman Singh, Kuli-Pratha, in Sitam ki Intaha Kya Hai, ed. Satyendra Kumar Taneja.
7 Bahadur, 38. In the same paragraph, Bahadur also describes that in “coolie folk songs, the recruiter is a cursed and vilified figure” (38). Scholars have debated whether the system of indenture was another form of slavery and coercion, or a system that enabled labour mobility, which provided an exit out of oppressive conditions in India for men and women caught in difficult circumstances. See Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-1929 (Hansib, 1993); Brij V Lal, Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2012); Ashutosh Kumar, Coolies of the Empire. Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman. The Odyssey of Indenture; Vijay Mishra, “Plantation Diaspora Testimonios and the Enigma of the Black Waters,” Interventions, 17.4 (2015), 548–567.
8 Mrinalini Sinha, “Totaram Sanadhya’s Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsha: A History of Empire and Nation in a Minor Key” in Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire, eds., Antoinette Burton, Isabel Hofmeyr (Duke University Press, 2014), 168–189. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv125jm1s.12, 176.
9 Sinha, 171. According to Sinha, Bharat Mitra had a “circulation of four thousand and a distribution that extended beyond Calcutta” and was “one of the more popular Indian papers in Fiji because of … its consistent coverage of the situation of Indians in Fiji” (176). It was closely connected to the Marwari Association of Calcutta, which was active in the cause of abolishing indenture, and in “rescuing and providing assistance to recruits lured into the emigration depots in Calcutta before embarkation for the plantations overseas” (176).
10 According to Sinha, 183, “The Pratap Relief Fund, subscribed to by readers and by other Indian newspapers, managed to rescue the press financially. The play itself went on to acquire further notoriety when a group of young revolutionaries from Mainpuri in the U.P. decided, in an act of defiance, to sell publications proscribed by the U.P. government at the 1917 annual session of the Indian National Congress in Delhi. The U.P. government responded swiftly by seizing all publications and issued a warrant for the arrest of these young men, at least some of whom managed to escape into hiding. In the trial that followed, which came to be known as the Mainpuri Conspiracy Case of 1918, the play was produced as evidence in the charges against the defendants in absentia.”
11 See Vijay Mishra, “Plantation Diaspora.”
12 Sarah Fatima Waheed, Hidden Histories of Pakistan. Censorship, Literature, and Secular Nationalism in Late Colonial India (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Literature was also banned under the Press and Registration of Books Act of 1867, the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876. For “Press and Registration of Books Acts, XXV of 1867” and “The Dramatic Performances Act, XIX of 1876” see Gouri Kant Roy, Law Relating to Press and Sedition (Simla: Station Press, 1915; reprint nd).
13 Robert Darnton, “Literary Surveillance in the British Raj: The Contradictions of Liberal Imperialism,” Book History 4 (2001), 134.
14 Darnton, 133–34.
15 Darnton gives the example of William Lawler, a “literary policeman” who catalogued the books according to the requirements of “Act XXV of the Governor General of India in Council for 1867: language of text, author, subject, place of printing and publication, name of printer and publisher, date of publication, number of pages, format, edition, press run, printing by movable type or lithography, price, owner of copyright”(133). In addition, says Darnton, the cataloguer also wrote “Remarks” on the text in column 16, in which he “summarized the narratives of novels, poems, and plays in a way that would make their moral clear for his own readers, the men who ruled over the ‘natives’ in the ICS (134). After 1857, says Darnton, “the British used their surveillance of vernacular literature as a way to watch for signs of danger” and suggests that the “cataloguers paid special attention to plays,” many of which dealt with British injustice, exploitation by landlords, and missionaries, and made the “whole regime look evil” (143).
16 Tanya Agathocleous in Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023), https://doi-org/proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/10 .1515/9781501753909, tracks the legal history of the term “disaffection” as follows: “In 1870 Section 124a was added to the Indian Penal Code to make disaffection a central yet loosely defined term in the government’s arsenal against journalistic critique. Drawn from British sedition law but rarely used in British legal practice, the vagueness of what counted as disaffection broadened the possibilities for retaliation against verbal dissent. Because Section 124a made it interchangeable with incitement to violence, disaffection was punishable by censorship, fines, imprisonment, or transportation for life.” (viii). She argues that the language of “affect” used in colonial law continues to affect the politics in post-colonial India in terms of its evocation against writers and journalists: “124a is nonetheless brandished as a weapon against free speech by allowing for the arrest and trial—if not the conviction—of protestors because the language of affect still allows for broad application. Like many other aspects of colonial administration, then, 124a’s antidemocratic effects reverberated long past the end of British rule” (ix-x).
17 Sukeshi Kamra in The Indian Political Press and the Production of Nationalist Rhetoric (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) has pointed out that the intended audiences for translations of native periodicals and vernacular newspapers were government officials.
18 An example of the late nineteenth censorship of drama includes Dinabandhu Mishra’s Play Neel Darpan about the problems that labourers faced on indigo plantations in Bengal. See Nandi Bhatia, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).
19 Barrier, Banned, 9. Also see Graham Shaw and Mary Lloyd, Publications Proscribed by the Government of India (London: British Library), 1985; Pragya Dhital’s blog, “Plugging the holes in history: banned political pamphlets in Colonial India,” 14 December 2020. https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2020/12/plugging-the-holes-in-history-banned-political-pamphlets-in-colonial-india.html.
20 Barrier, Banned, 13.
21 Barrier, 67.
22 Barrier, 67.
23 Barrier, 69.
24 Barrier, 70.
25 Vijay Mishra, “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora.” Textual Practice 10. 3 (1996), 427.
26 Kumar, Coolies of the Empire, 24.
27 Mishra, “Plantation Diaspora,” 550–551.
28 Mishra, “Plantation Diaspora,” 49-50. In this article, according to Mishra, “Although caste categories were brought to the plantation, the fact of Kala-Pani always haunted those who left home for the new land, and it is perhaps for this reason that caste itself became a lot more malleable in the plantation colonies” (550).
29 “The Agreement and the Girmitya.” Harvard Law Review, vol. 134. Issue 5, March 2021, 1850.
30 Harvard Law Review, 1850.
31 Harvard Law Review, 1851.
32 Harvard Law Review, 1850.
33 Harvard Law Review, 1852.
34 Karen A. Ray in “Kunti, Lakshmibhai and the ‘Ladies’: Women’s Labour and the Abolition of Indentured Emigration from India.” Labour, Capital and Society, 29.1/2 (April/November 1996), 126-152, argues that “The role played by women - and the construction of the value of their labour and their honour - in this early movement was both real and symbolic. It was the chief catalyst in halting recruitment in 1917 and bringing the system to an end in 1920, events which happened long before Sarojini Naidu turned in silk for khadi” (148).
35 Rajsekhar Basu, “Kunti’s Cry: Response in India to the Cause of Emigrant Women, Fiji 1913-1916, Studies in People’s History, 7.2 (2020), 180-191.
36 Basu, 189.
37 Totaram Sanadhya, Fiji Me Mere Ikkis Varsha (My Twenty-One Years in Fiji; Ferozabad, Agra: Bharati Bhawan, 1914). The English translation is as follows: Totaram Sanadhya, My Twenty-One Years in the Fiji Islands and The Story of the Haunted Line, translated and edited by John Dunham Kelly and Uttra Kumari Singh (Suva: Fiji Museum, 1991; 2003). According to Sinha, Sanadhya’s book was first published in November 1914 “by an obscure Hindi-language press in Ferozabad in Agra district, in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (U.P.)” (169) and 1000 copies were printed in 1914 (178). Even though it was “not a major publication,” it enjoyed wide circulation: “By, 1916, for example, it was already in its third edition, and it had been published in four Gujarati translations, two Bengali, one Marathi, and one Urdu. The vibrant Indian-language press as well as some of the Indian-owned English language newspapers in India reported favorably on the book….[And it] even managed to garner a brief mention in the corridors of power at the India Office and the Colonial Office in London” (169). The book was published in English language translation in 1991, which Sinha says, “is a reminder of its parochial reputation” and its “minor” status. This “minor” status, argues Sinha, “is in itself deserving of attention: it illuminates an important, albeit inassimilable, moment—an interregnum between the Age of Empires and the Age of Nations—in the political history of the twentieth century” (168). The second edition of the book (2000 copies) was published in 1915 under the title, Fiji Dweep Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh (My Twenty-One Years in the Fiji Islands; Sinha, 178). A third edition was published in 1916 by Pratap Pustakaly of Kanpur (179). See Sinha for a detailed article of the book’s history of publication.
38 Sinha, 169.
39 Sinha, 169.
40 Sinha, 171.
41 Sinha, 177.
42 Sinha, 178.
43 Sinha, 181.
44 See Mishra, Lal, Kumar.
45 See Kumar, Chapter 6.
46 Kumar, 176.
47 Kumar, 176.
48 “Plantation Diaspora,” 554.
49 Kumar, 163.
50 Kumar, 163.
51 Kumar, 217. Another memoir from Fiji that Kumar mentions is that of Ramchandra Rao, who wrote about his experiences in Fiji in 1939 after returning to India in 1915 (Kumar, 163). For a discussion of Totaram and Ramchandra, see Chapter 6, “Writing the Girmitya Experience” in Kumar’s Coolies of the Empire.
52 “Plantation Diaspora,” 553.
53 Sinha, 182.
54 Sinha, 178.
55 Charu Gupta, “‘Innocent’ Victims/’Guilty’ Migrants: Hindi Public Sphere, Caste and Indentured Women in Colonial North India.” Modern Asian Studies, 49.5 (September 2015), 1345-77.
56 Basu, 190.
57 Harvard Law Review, 1856. This description implies that the play was performed. I have not been able to access the play’s performance history.
58 For a discussion of late 19th-century nationalism’s construction of its women, see Partha Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonized Women: The Contest in India,” American Ethnologist 16. 4 (November 1989), 622-633.
59 Kumar, 43.
60 Crispin Bates and Marina Carter, “Enslaved Lives, Enslaving Labels: A New Approach to the Colonial Indian Labour Diaspora,” in New Routes for Diaspora Studies. Edited by Sukanya Banerjee, Aims McGuiness and Steven C. McKay (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2012), 73.
61 Bates and Carter, 88.
62 Bates and Carter, 88.
63 Basu, 180.
64 In Basu, 180.
65 Basu, 181.
66 Basu, 183.
67 Basu, 181.
68 Taneja, 143.
69 Harvard Law Review.
70 “A Bill to Empower the Government to Prohibit Certain Dramatic Performances,” Bhatia, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance, 121.
71 “A Bill to Empower the Government to Prohibit Certain Performances,” 121-122.
72 Kumar identifies novels that reference indenture. These include Manna Dwivedi Gajpuri’s Ramlal: Gramin Jivan ka ek Samajik Upanyas, (Prayag, 1917), which references remittance from abroad, including Canada, 26-27, and Premchand’s Godan (Prayag, 1936; reprinted 2008 by New Delhi: Vani Prakashan) as a novel that has a reference to “Mirach” or Mauritius.
73 Harvard Law Review, 1856.
74 Mentioned in Harvard Law Review, 1855.
75 “Translation of a Book Named Coolie Pratha.” BLL IOR: J&P 1109, 1917.
76 BLL IOR: J&P 1109, 1917.
77 BLL IOR: J&P 1109, 1917.
78 Deana Heath, Purifying Empire. Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 170.
79 “Translation of a Book Named Coolie Pratha.” BLL IOR: J&P 1109, 1917.
80 I thank the editors for this suggestion.
81 Tanya Agathocleous in Disaffected makes the point that “In the debates about censorship that followed the 1857 Rebellion and raged on for several decades, British and Anglo-Indian journalism that circulated in India was upheld as a model of rational and judicious critique, and of intercultural dialogue and analysis; Indian writing was meant to model itself on this example, yet necessarily operated in a separate sphere from white writing, which was seldom policed by the government,” x.
82 Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive. Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (Verso, 1993).
83 “List of Books Proscribed Under the Indian Press Act, 1910,” BLL IOR: l/PJ/6/1477.
84 “Indentured immigration summary of a Hindi book prohibited in the United Provinces under the Press Act.” BLL IOR, J&P 1109, 1917; L/P/J/6/1479.
85 BLL IOR, File J&P, 6050, 1919.
86 “To His Excellency the Right Honourable the Governor-General of India in Council.” Public Record, no. 1, India Office, London, 22nd January 1915. In BLL IOR: L/PJ/6/1477. 1461 J&P 701 to 885, 1917.
87 Meenakshi Mukherjee, The Perishable Empire. Essays on Indian Writing in English (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 16.
88 Nicholas Dirks, “Foreword.” Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge. The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), ix.
89 Christopher Pinney, “Iatrogenic Religion and Politics.” In Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella, eds, Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 40.
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Nandi Bhatia
Nandi Bhatia is a Professor in the Department of English and Writings Studies at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) in Canada. Her research interests include Postcolonial Literature and theory, literature of the 1947 Partition of India, diasporic literature, and theatre. She is the author of Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India (University of Michigan Press and OUP, 2004), Performing Women/Performing Womanhood: Theatre, Politics and Dissent in North India (OUP, 2010), and co-editor (with Anjali Gera-Roy) of Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement, and Resettlement (Pearson-Longman, 2008), and Regional Perspectives on India’s Partition: Shifting the Vantage Points (Routledge, 2023). She has served on the editorial/advisory boards of the Journal of South Asian Popular Culture, Feminist Review, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Negotiations: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, and The Forest City Film Festival. For her research, she was awarded the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature and was named UWO Faculty Scholar.