Imperialism and Sikh Migration by Anjali Gera Roy

Author:Anjali Gera Roy [Roy, Anjali Gera]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781351802970
Google: ZUk4DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-03T04:17:02+00:00

The imperial enclave society, regulated mobilities and the Punjabi culture of mobility

The 1900s was the peak period of regulated migration of different segments of the colonized to different parts of the British Empire. The recruitment of Sikhs in the army and the police, in the construction of the railways and on plantations, the indenturement of workers from UP, Bihar and Tamilnadu to work in Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana and South Africa, the facilitation of Gujarati and Sindhi traders to operate in the Indian Ocean, and the travels of Indian students and intellectuals to the UK and the US confirm that Indian migrations overseas were largely propelled by the Empire. However, the movements from Punjab differed from those in other parts of India in their being movements of free workers due to the Sikhs’ feeling of being entitled to mobility as loyal soldiers of the imperial army, a sentiment that was fostered by the British themselves through their construction of different segregated spaces.

The imperial regime of mobility essentially regulated movements through exercising control on direction, gender, class and, in the Indian context, caste. While imperial agents forcibly conscripted impoverished villagers from certain parts of India to work as coolies on plantations in Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji, Malaya and so on, they debarred them from migrating to other regions. Similarly, while some groups of Indians such as Punjabis and Gujaratis were encouraged to settle in certain parts of the Empire such as East Africa or West Indies through grant of lands, their attempt to acquire property in predominantly white colonies such as Australia and Canada invited punitive closure. Similar strictures pertaining to particular castes were framed to ensure the supply of the kind of skills that were in demand in the receiving areas such as those of soldiers and policemen in Southeast Asia, of plantation workers in Australia and of artisans in East Africa. Stereotyped characteristics associated with certain castes or sending areas, or even dietary requirements and taboos, could play a crucial role in enabling or curtailing mobility. Equally important to the regulation of mobilities was the direction of flows that were completely determined by imperial policies.

Although Sikh soldiers continued to be conscripted in the imperial army and artisans in the construction of the Uganda-Kenya railways, the perceived threat from foreign labour culminated in the formulation of legal measures in Australia and Canada. If the White Australia policy was formulated to put an end to Sikh migration to New South Wales, the Continuous Journey Regulation of 1908 was designed to keep undesirable Asiatics out to maintain a White Canada. The larger imperial machinery that had propelled Punjabi narratives of mobility and the movements of Sikhs to certain parts of the Empire was put into motion to immobilize the free flows of certain groups of Sikhs to other parts through the processes of enclavement, which exercised governmentality over Sikh populations by legal exclusions and bureaucratic barriers as well as by enclosure. The regime of immobility worked through “sequestrations, exclusions and closures” that were both military-political and social and cultural and, in one instance, biological (2007: 290).

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