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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It kind of touches upon everything, economy, politics, culture.
This is about eight decades of Indians moving to different parts of the world, as you say, Fiji in the South Pacific, all the way to Caribbean.
One of the biggest legacies, of course, is the creation of these new identities that Neha just told us about and these new cultures.
aspects of the Indian diaspora that many of whom remain quite Indian in their culture, but as you say, also created their own distinct identity as Indo-Mauritians, as Indo-Caribbean.
And it has talked about the population and cultural legacies.
To me, one of the bigger legacies, of course, as a historian thinking about what's happening in India at the time, is considering how the abolition of indenture and the discussion and discourse that came out of that snowballed into a very important part of the Indian independence movement.
and the mass mobilisation politics that we know about the Indian independence movement today, many of it started with people like Gandhi, who were based in India, but also ex-indentured migrants, a very important person being Totaram Sanathia, who was an Indo-Fijian man,
who came back to India this time, as many did as part of the repatriation process, who would go on and giving lectures around different parts of the country in India to try to show his experience of the indenture trade and use that as a way to rile people up to speak against the indenture system.
On paper, every indentured migrant who signed up to join the trade got six months wage advance.
Multiple people who came back and spoke to multiple investigative committees said that they never received that wage advance or they received it from the labour recruiters and then some of it was taken away as sort of fee.
Yes, exactly.
But there was the idea that you could just get cash in hand immediately.
Most indentured migrants were under quite severe surveillance before they moved onto the ships.
They were kept in these warehouse kind of spaces on the ports known as depots.
In Calcutta and Mumbai and Madras and all of that.
Five to six months, up to sometimes three months.
Yes, so there are multiple times in the indenture system itself where people's names were recorded.
So the first time is when people are brought to the port cities.
There are government officials, colonial officials, who take down things like name and where they come from, their village name or geographical space.
For women, they often take down whether they're married or not.
Showing 61–80 of 85 · page 4 of 5
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