Cultures of Protest in Transnational Contexts: Indian Seamen Abroad, 1885-1945

Abstract

This paper offers a preliminary exploration of contexts and forms of protest and defiance of authority by Indian seafarers employed on ocean-going steam vessels over six decades to the end of World War II. Though relatively small in numbers and apparently untypical in many respects of a 'modern' industrial workforce, the study of Indian seafarers can shed interesting light on several wider aspects of Indian labour history. The transnational and trans-cultural context of employment of Indian seamen also helps illuminate their subjectivities, knowledges, and agencies in ways that are obscured in more insular histories, while their encounters with bosses and others in authority invite us to re-examine pervasive notions of cultural difference-'owned' as well as attributed.This paper is not about union-led protests, nor about 'everyday' forms of resistance. It dwells instead on a potentially vast and apparently uncharted middle ground of collective resistance by ships' crews. Such resistance, perhaps simmering for weeks at sea, came to head at key moments, usually upon arrival at a foreign port, close to sailing, or when seamen were being transferred from one vessel to another. It could involve, besides the seamen themselves and their ships' officers, a swathe of state agencies including local authorities, the police, and the judiciary, though rarely if ever, unions of local seamen.On the evidence here, the culture of work and protest of Indian seamen appears to have been informed by a certain rationality-a certain careful weighing of costs, benefits, and opportunities for engagement and disengagement, including through protest-that is altogether at odds with characteristic representations of Calcutta jute workers and British maritime workers enduring similar circumstances or facing similar 'choices'. At the same time this culture was open to modern, secular, and transnational solidarities grounded in universalist values. Paradoxes of this nature demand a sustained effort to recover and re-interpret the complex but immensely creative

Port Politics: Indian Seamen, Australian Unions and Indonesian Independence, 1945-47

“…Balachandran argues that because of their political vulnerability away from home, in colonial conditions, the Indians focussed on conflicts over contractual conditions like demands to transfer between ships or between ports, where they could defend their actions legally. 21 His depiction of a politically aware and strategically assertive body of seamen is supported by Tabili's research on Indian seafarers who had become resident in English port communities. 22 These tactics can all be traced in the Australian events.…”

“…Both the transfer to another shipping company, the transfer to vessels whose destination was NOT an Indian one and the transfer to another port were all actions contradictory to the Indian articles of agreement under which Indians were contracted and were precisely the circumstances to which Indians had developed strategic opposition in the past in the United Kingdom and in Australia. 76 The second source of labour was British India itself, and the Dutch received the active cooperation of the British colonial administration to recruit seamen in Bombay. The timing of the arrival and forced mobilisation of these replacement Indian crews was not well recorded in the early boycott, but it is clear that they had not been informed about the political role they would be fulfilling by sailing on the Dutch ships.…”

Maritime Labour, Circulations of Struggle, and Constructions of Transnational Subaltern Agency: The Spatial Politics of the 1939 Indian Seafarers’ Strikes

“…A few days later the Chief Superintendent (Scotland District) reported that he had “been informed by the Anchor Line that the Lascar Deck ratings who refused to transfer to the SS Britannia on the 2 nd instant have been released from Gaol and sent to Liverpool to join the Britannia ”. This suggests that contestation of transfers were used as moments of strategic leverage to win concessions (see also Balachandran 2008:60−61).…”