Charles Masson and the Buddhist Sites of Afghanistan: Explorations, Excavations, Collections 1832–1835

Abstract

1. Prabhu Mohapatra, “‘Restoring the Family’: Wife Murders and the Making of a Sexual Contract for Indian Immigrant Labour in the British Caribbean Colonies, 1860-1920”, Studies in History, Vol. 11, No.2 (New Delhi: Sage,1995) p.p. 227-260. The very making of the legal conceptions of a ‘family’ is seen here at the turn of the century, by the author, to be coeval with the decline of the indenture system and the consequent replacement of the same with the family labour of the ex-indentured labour. The very making of this legal concept of the ‘family’ is seen here, at the cost of the women workers who were made to transform into the reproducer of the labour from a wage earning worker. It highlights specifically the price paid by the women in the change in the form of labour from ‘indenture’ to ‘free wage work’. Other works for example, Brij V. Lal, Chalo Jahaji: on a journey through indenture in Fiji, (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2012), also highlight especially the experience of women workers in plantations being blamed for the ‘failure’ of the system of indenture even as its very structure compounded the conditions of murders, mortality and suicides in the plantations. While the latter deals with the period of indenture and the former tracks the changes from one system to another, Gaiutra Bahadur historicizes the experience of the coolie woman through the structures of violence that survived the history of indenture and free wage work to the present. However, by placing the coolie woman at the center of the narrative of indenture, she has outlined the possibility of many histories that such a narrative can beget, when it tries to push against the historical coordinates that make itself, thereby providing narratives of women who succeed in challenging the violence as well.