In many ways the First World War was a harbinger of change in Indian politics. Economic dislocation, inflated prices and government control on trade increased the hardships of the people, making them increasingly conscious of the oppressive nature of the rule of their imperial government. In Bengal the intellectual element pondered over the cause-and-effect relationship between the political situation and the economic condition.

The Bengali popular press was particularly vocal against colonial indifference to the economic plight of the people. The Viswamitra thought that ‘subjugation was the real cause of famine because the commercial policy of the government enabled the foreigners to exploit the land’. The Hitabadi too was of the opinion that the establishment of mills and factories had not benefited India and the artisan class was growing poorer. Dainik Bharatmitra argued that prospect of British capitalists opening more factories would mean further systematic exploitation. Samyavadi felt that to eliminate India's poverty it was necessary to ensure not only that the raw materials for manufacture came from India, but also that the manufacturers should themselves be Indians. British policy was held responsible for encouraging foreign exploiters and the Marwaris. The Bengali pointed out that the monopoly enjoyed by the Railways and the Steamer Company was the cause of high prices. The most insistent cry was against the export of rice. When the restrictions against interprovincial movements of rice crops were removed, it created a great stir.

Until 1919, the Congress as an organization did not have much connection with the grass roots. However, following the First World War, two broad factors contributed to the change in its structure. The Act of 1919 widened the franchise, which made Congress eager to extend its organizational network to provincial and district levels. This period also saw a considerable section of the Indian people being drawn into nationalist politics. The Congress could not ignore these changes. Therefore, when faced with the problem of adopting a new scheme of agitation in 1920, the Congress had to reform its constitution to gain a broad-based and permanent character.

On the final day of the Congress session at Nagpur in December 1920, delegates approved a new constitution for the Congress committee. The British Committee of Congress was dissolved along with its paper India. This marked the end of the politics of petitions. Henceforth, Congress leaders were to concentrate more on their own actions within India than on playing to the British gallery.

The new Congress constitution proposed the establishment of a working committee of 15 members, which was to function as a permanent Congress executive. From a loose federation of 200 members, the Congress became a more active and permanent organization. Congress circles were reorganized on a linguistic basis so as to extend the roots of its organization to the subdivision and taluka level.

The Chauri Chaura incident followed by the Bardoli Resolution brought the non-cooperation movement to a sudden halt. Its participants were left without any clearly defined and intelligible objective and the result was confusion. But once the initial despair was overcome, the non-cooperators began to reconstruct a programme on lines that would appeal to the popular imagination.

In Bengal, the Bardoli Resolution slowed down the pace of preparation for civil disobedience. In some places like Noakhali, Birbhum and parts of Rajshahi the activities of volunteers picketing excise shops did not stop stop immediately, but at Rangpur, in Gaibandha and Kurigram, the volunteers began to follow the Bardoli Resolution programme and engaged themselves in social reconstruction. In most of the districts, constructive social work, such as popularizing the use of charka among the poorer people, continued unhampered. Organizational reconstruction, like enlistment of Congress members by district Congress committees, also continued as usual. Official records show that ‘almost everywhere, the political atmosphere remained calm, marked by a general disappointment among the people’.

Earlier in 1922, Chitta Ranjan Das and his lieutenants were arrested in connection with the boycott of the visit of the Prince of Wales in December 1921 and the BPCC was dominated by Shyam Sundar Chakrabarti and his followers. Later in the Chittagong conference of 1922 C R Das introduced the concept of obstruction and non-cooperation from within the council.

The resolution of Purna Swaraj adopted by the All-India Congress in Lahore resuscitated nationalist spirit, despite the hardships caused by the international economic crisis of 1930. According to official reports the resolution of independence and the decision to celebrate Independence Day on 26 January initially aroused little enthusiasm in Bengal. The major reason, as cited by the magistrate of Rangpur was ‘rivalry of leadership and split in the Congress itself’.

Yet as Gandhi launched his Dandi March and placed before the public a positive programme, the salt satyagraha, enthusiasm for civil disobedience developed rapidly in Bengal. An All-Bengal Council of Civil Disobedience was formed and it was decided to violate the salt law in the coastal districts of Chattogram, Noakhali, Barisal, Khulna, 24 Parganas and Midnapur. Every district was to form a civil disobedience committee comprised of the important personalities of the district suder and mahakuma and also make provisions for raising funds. The civil disobedience movement, with its clear anti-imperialist agenda, once again helped to crystallize efforts towards linking elite politics and the relatively spontaneous politics of the people into an organized movement.

The civil disobedience movement in Bengal was organized by special Congress district civil disobedience committees which were affiliated to the local Congress committees. Satyagraha camps were organized to train volunteers who would spread the message of civil disobedience to the far corners of the province and carry on the movement.

This study has thus gone beyond the two received paradigms: (a) that organized politics of the Congress retained its elitist character throughout the period of nationalist struggle and (b) the idea that the politics of the people ran parallel to and was relatively autonomous of institutional politics. Both of these stereotypes have ignored the areas of interaction and interdependence of the two realms of political activities, especially during the phase of Gandhian nationalism. This work demonstrates that from 1919 the Congress tried to maintain its link with the people, which to a large extent contributed to an interaction between organized and unorganized politics. Gandhi's strategy of satyagraha and non-cooperation on specific issues sustained this process. However, Gandhi laid down specific conditions and boundaries within which the people were expected to act. Popular upsurges were withdrawn whenever they reached a certain momentum and began to cross this Gandhian barrier. In analysing the nature of this interaction, this book has concentrated primarily on the non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements and the periods immediately thereafter.

During the days of the non-cooperation movement, the institutional programme of the Congress was one of boycott and non-cooperation with the British educational, judicial and administrative systems. It also involved economic boycott of British commodities. To involve the masses in a year-long movement, it was necessary to resuscitate the Congress organization in Bengal and create a network through which it could reach the grass roots. The Congress organization was extended down to the village level so that the local people could be mobilized by Congress propaganda.

The lengthy, cramped voyage was succeeded, for new immigrants, by the procedures of disembarkation and allocation to employers. In some cases indentured labourers were engaged to a specific plantation in India and would be sent directly, usually on foot or in carts, to the estate-owner who had requisitioned them. In other cases, new arrivals would be placed in an immigration depot, to be viewed and engaged by local planters. Women who arrived without a male partner were often also ‘looked over’ by prospective spouses. The new arrivals would be taken before a magistrate to sign indenture contracts, which varied in length between one and five years. As the nineteenth century progressed, the five-year indenture became the norm.

The Moment of Departure – Coolie Choices and Voices

The testimonies of migrants frequently bear witness to a pre-existing decision to look for work away from their native village, to join the armies of rural Indians tramping the roads looking for seasonal employment, before the fateful meeting with a recruiter that was to lead them much further afield, to a distant colony.

Césaire, Négritude and Coolitude

MC: You had a very interesting encounter with Aimé Césaire, the great poet from Martinique who coined the word négritude, in December 1997. What is the link between négritude and coolitude?

KT: Aimé Césaire invented the word négritude in the 1920s, in the midst of colonial turmoil. Coolitude was framed in 1992. There are two principal similarities between négritude and coolitude:

1. – The recollection of a common phase of history and the need to redress the state of oblivion and neglect attached to the condition of the Negro, and to that of the Coolie. The descendants of indentured labourers, like those of slaves, often knew very little of their past history. They were ignorant of the cultural implications of the Voyage. One of the aims of coolitude is also to foster a larger community of vision encompassing the experiences of people of African descent and fostering interaction with the later immigrant groups in those colonial societies, to which coolies migrated in the period immediately following the abolition of slavery, even though Indian labour was already present during slavery. […]

Poetic texts in prose

Coolitude: because my country heaves with new traces of memory. And if negro gestures come to our hands as we cut the canes, there remains in us those movements of fingers used to the tabla and which the ravanne often harmonised in the great cry of hearts left to wander.

From Négritude to Créolité

Black US intellectuals like W E B Du Bois and Booker T Washington are credited with the commencement of black studies. Activists, like Marcus Garvey, took up their work whose stand against discrimination and injustice gave a new drive to the movement of black consciousness. Négritude is the francophone equivalent, and dates from the launch of L'Etudiant Noir in 1934 by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sedar Sengor and Léon Gontran Damas.

In most of the colonies to which indentured Indians migrated, and where subsequent or pre-existing mercantile communities from India also settled, the latter made strenuous efforts to disassociate themselves from the negatively stereotyped ‘coolie’. For example, in 1888 a group of Indian merchants in Johannesburg urged the government to resist agitators who sought ‘to class your petitioners with Arabs, Coolies, or Chinese not suitable to do business in this State … your petitioners assure your Excellencies that they are none of these people and have nothing in common with them.’

This volume has sought to rediscover the coolie, firstly through an exploration of the stereotypes which evolved about the Indian labour migrant in official documents and in the early literature, and secondly through an assessment of more recent writing which has explored Indian identities in diaspora. The purpose of this exploration has been to redefine and reappropriate the concept of the coolie. Through coolitude, an articulation and an evocation of the Indian labour diaspora, the coolie can effectively be revoiced. Contemporary texts which described – and often distorted – our image of the coolie, whether travellers' observations or accounts of colonists and residents of the territories to which Indians migrated, have been characterized by exoticism.