Purba Hossain
speaker
85 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 21 May
Purba Hossain’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Generally, we do know of multiple indentured migrants who did, after they have gone to the Caribbean, to Fiji, to Mauritius, who did take the opportunity of the end of the contract to try to get some of that agency back.
We know of multiple people who put in applications to move to a different colony or to a different estate because they heard from other indentured migrants that that was slightly better for them or move to colonies would be easier to kind of settle down a bit.
But we know so many
indentured migrants who had absolutely no idea what they were signing on for.
We know of people in the 1830s who were told that they were going to be going on a five-day journey.
They ended up going on a two-month journey.
Who were told they were going to be abroad for six months.
They were abroad for, well, five years in the plantation and then the travel time.
As late as 1898, we know of people who thought that land would be visible throughout the journey.
Many of these people from the hinterlands have never been on the oceans, so many of them we know were expecting really a river journey to somewhere in or near India.
South Africa was one of the parts of the British Empire that also saw the use of Indian indentured labour.
I believe from the middle of the 19th century, Indian labourers were also moving as indentured migrants to South Africa, working not just on the field, but in a variety of jobs.
One of the reasons why South Africa becomes so important to the voices against indenture is because of Gandhi, who, you know, before he started becoming really involved in the Indian independence movement with a lawyer educated in London, for instance, and then based in South Africa, where he realised that there were multiple groups of Indian origin involved.
or Indians living in South Africa at the time.
People like him who were professionals, people who were labourers, and people who had specifically gone under the indentured system to work in the particular part of South Africa known as Natal.
And Gandhi became very involved in the rights of Indians.
And in that case, the rights of Indians, of course, included the rights of indentured migrants and the descendants of indentured migrants.
The South African voice then really comes in as part of the discussion of indentured migrants as part of a wider Indian diaspora.
And thinking particularly about how prejudice against people of Indian origin in South Africa, as in many other colonies across the British Empire, prejudice against Indian indentured migrants became part of the prejudice against Indians as a whole.
So when Gandhi is back in India in the beginning of the 20th century, very end of the 19th century, this entire discourse and this entire experience he had in South Africa became part of the wider discourse that was coming up out of India at this time, which was that the British imperial system that existed in India needed a complete overhaul, moving later to the asking for complete independence.
Showing 41–60 of 85 · page 3 of 5
← Previous
Next →