Coolitude

AN EARLY EXPOSITION

Coolitude is both an intellectual interpretation, and a poetic and artistic immersion into the world of the vanished coolie.

The concept of coolitude encompasses the experiences of the first generation workers together with those of their descendants spread across the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean islands today. Indeed the symbolic value of the word lies in the scope it gives us for considering both the specificities of the coolie experience and its use as a comparative tool.

All those Indians, irrespective of whether they went to Fiji, South Africa, the West Indies or the Indian Ocean islands, underwent an exile from homeland, and coolitude emphasizes their shared history. The ‘coolies’ also shared a common work experience, having, in the main, left India for sugar cane labour. Patterns of employment and settlement were alike from Guiana to Mauritius. Throughout the empire, Indian labour was subjected to special laws to ensure that they would work harder than it was supposed individuals would work if they did not have the threat of prison and excessive wage cuts hanging over their heads.

Coolitude expresses the distinct and peculiar limbo which kept the Indian under indenture apart from his peers and in a condition which was between servitude and freedom. In fact in most societies to which the Indian labourer migrated, unlike his enslaved predecessors, he could aspire to full citizenship and property rights once his contract was over.  The idea of return, and the hope of going home, is a distinctive characteristic of coolitude.  The horizons of the coolie were larger than orthodox depictions of downtrodden toiling proletarians could convey: coolies aspired to visit their families in India, have their wives and relatives brought over, acquire a plot of land or open a shop, in sum they had options in India or in exile, and this is the essence and universality of coolitude.

Coolitude addresses questions arising from acculturation, identity formation, and the response to Imperialism. It incorporates themes of postcoloniality and hybridity

The dehumanisation of the slave cast its shadow over succeeding generations, whose attempt to refashion their own history is defined in the ‘negritude’ movement. The concept of coolitude describes and encapsulates the distinctive characteristics of the streams of indentured migrants who replaced the slaves in the post-abolition plantations and whose arrival and settlement decisively shaped modern nations such as Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana and Fiji.

The ‘coolie’ has always been negatively portrayed. Contemporaries dismissed labour migrants as the “sweepings of Calcutta’s slums”; the contracts they signed victimised them further, by identifying them as a societal ‘other’ – a prey to prison and pariahs amongst free men. Even with the hindsight of history, coolies have fared little better: assigned the status of a ‘neo-slave’, stripped of caste, culture, even of family in some accounts. Coolitude deconstructs the stereotype image of the coolie.

The metaphor of the voyage was played out throughout the coolie’s life. From the first crossing of the ‘kala pani’ – that forbidden sea journey – the migrant was cast as an adventurer experiencing the raw emotion of transition and upheaval, of uncertainty and struggle.

The coolie was never the passive instrument of the colonialist imagination or the historian’s pen. The coolie was not forever condemned to be famine victim, dully toiling with the hoe, helpless to eradicate the burden of a momentary hunger. The indenture experience was not static and the coolie’s adjustments and aspirations carried a first-generation of migrants forward, beyond the indenture contract, towards the hopes of prosperity, ownership and return. The years of exile were both painful and productive.

The forging of a new identity in diaspora took the migrant far from the confines of governors’ platitudes and historical assessments.  The experiences of the coolie place him on a par with migrants of whatever hue, across a range of climes and times. And yet the coolie imbued the places of settlement with a defiant, distinctive Indianness.