Indian indentured labor reproduced subcontinental caste hierarchy, muting collective resistance

Evidence

Indian indentured workers, who had now assumed the economic role of the slaves (and in the eyes of many, white and Creole, their status as well), were understandably somewhat distant from collective resistance. Within 20 years of the arrival of the first 225 Indians on the Fatel Rozack in 1845, according to Donald Wood, their semisegregated communities and villages had quite successfully begun the replication of much of the social striation of the subcontinent: vast chasms had been opened between the prosperous who had obtained land, shops, or managed to become moneylenders, and the “coolie” masses. Within 20 more years, in several hundred villages woven around sugar and their own industries of wet rice, maize, and peas, the blanket of their transferred society muffled their response to being cheated, abused, extorted, and exploited by white and countryman alike. Periodically there were labor strikes on the estates (a series of them occurred in the 1880s), but the initial expression of Indian consciousness was liberal rather than resistant. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1153

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with the African Creoles’ preserved radical tradition — the transported social structure of India suppressed resistance while the African cultural remnant sustained it; central to the book’s comparative claim about what enables radicalism. — connects to: Indian migrants to the US came predominantly as petty bourgeois, not workers — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 327