Indenture contracts themselves forged a distinct workers’ consciousness among South Asian migrants

Evidence

The labor contract, however, was also instrumental in forming workers’ consciousness (Lal 1983; Mishra 2005; Prashad 2000)—specifically, a ”Girmit consciousness,” named for the girmit, or the agreement South Asian workers in Fiji signed to return to their homelands when they completed their term of colonial indenture, reflecting their desire to obtain capital through transnational labor migration and developed in response to the exploitation of workers. For the Girmitiya, as these workers came to be known, the formal labor agreement constituted a specific relationship to the British Empire based on the exchange of labor for a guarantee of social and economic rights. Through layers of exploitation and deceit, however, the colonial edifice came to represent the trauma of migration. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 487

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘Girmit consciousness’ and ‘Girmitiya’ — key conceptual terms for the chapter’s argument about labor diaspora identity formation.
• XREF: Parallels E.P. Thompson’s ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ — the idea that a labor regime structure generates class consciousness; also links to Tinker’s work on indenture as ‘a new system of slavery.’ — connects to: Indian migrants to the US came predominantly as petty bourgeois, not workers — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 327