Tamil Diasporas across the Bay of Bengal

Abstract

In both academic writing and public discourse, the term “diaspora” has come to denote almost any migrant group of shared origin.1 As Engseng Ho puts it, “today, almost every ethnic group, country, or separatist movement has its diaspora”; this marks a significant expansion from the original use of the term to refer to the Jewish and later the Armenian and the African experiences.2 Histories of diaspora have proliferated where once there were histories of migration, or immigration. As a term of analysis in the humanities and the social sciences, “diaspora” has usefully drawn our attention to the importance of transnational connections and flows. Diasporic histories do not view migration as a linear journey from source to destination, but emphasize the enduring links—imaginative, familial, economic, or political—maintained by mobile people with their lands of origin.3 As several million Tamil-speaking people moved back and forth across the Bay of Bengal in the century after 1850—in particular between the southeastern coast of India, the Straits Settlements, and the Malay Peninsula—diasporic communities were made and unraveled alongside other kinds of local and transnational communities.4 For most of the nineteenth century, until the 1870s, the connections between South India and Southeast Asia were characterized by constant circulation.5 Contiguous, sometimes overlapping communities of Tamil Muslim and Hindu traders, boatmen, dockworkers, and laborers sojourned in the port cities of Singapore and Penang (known, together with Melaka, as the Straits Settlements) and returned frequently to South India. Cultural symbols and religious practices circulated with them, shaping the urban landscape of the port cities of the Straits. Tamil sojourners in Southeast Asia formed local communities while maintaining oceanic connections. From the 1870s, Tamil migration to Southeast Asia underwent a transformation, with the arrival in Malaya of tens of thousands of young men from rural South India—most of them of low-caste Hindu or “untouchable” (dalit) background, many of them under indenture—to labor on the sugar and then the rubber plantations of the Malay Peninsula. This marked both an expansion and a narrowing of mobility across the Bay of Bengal: the number of journeys increased in the age of the steamship, but most Tamils in Malaya now lived and worked a world away from the openness of the port cities, enclosed and isolated on plantations.

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