Race, Religion and Labor Migration in the Indian Ocean

Fulfills the LAMA Requirement for History Majors & Minors.This course examines poor and oppressed communities in India who were compelled to seek employment as indentured laborers abroad, from colonial times to the present. Quite often their massive debts and experience of caste oppression and exploitation in Indian villages led them to seek a better life in rubber or tea plantations in Burma or Malaysia, in South African mines, or as contract laborers in the Persian Gulf. Did they find better lives abroad, or did they experience new forms of oppression? Was indentured labor the new slavery, or was it in fact a means to a better livelihood, where Indians had real agency and choice in pursuing a new life abroad?