Totaram Sanadhya's experience of racism in early white Australia (a transcreated narrative)

• Verfasst von: Bilimoria, Puruṣottama [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: Totaram Sanadhya's experience of racism in early white Australia (a transcreated narrative)
• Jahr: 2016
• Titel Quelle: Enthalten in: Nidān
• Ort Quelle: Durban : Univ., 1989
• Jahr Quelle: 2016
• Band/Heft Quelle: 1(2016), 1, Seite 8-23
• ISSN Quelle: 2414-8636
• DOI: doi:10.58125/nidan.2016.1
• Datenträger: Online-Ressource
• Sprache: eng
• Sach-SW: Australia
• Sach-SW: Diaspora
• Sach-SW: Empire
• Sach-SW: Girmit
• Sach-SW: Indenture
• Sach-SW: Indian
• Sach-SW: Slavery
• Sach-SW: Theosophical Society
• Sach-SW: race
• K10plus-PPN: 1839603097
• K10plus-PPN: CATS / Abt. Südasien
• Bibliothek/Idn: SA / m4344914953
• Lokale URL Inst.: Zum Volltext

Abstract

This essay falls outside the genre of the usual scholarly and analytical paper or article. Here I wish to indulge my readers in a narrative, a story, that is somewhat fictionalised, albeit from real events that took place and chronicled in the journal (issued shortly after as a book in India in Hindi) of an itinerant Indian nationalist activist, the late Pandit Totaram Sanadhya (totarām sanāḍhya). Pandit Sanadhya happened to be returning from the colonised islands of Fiji in 1914, after his sojourn there of some twenty-one years among the Indian sugar-cane plantation indentured coolies. He was lured to the backwaters of the Empire deceitfully by British recruiters who he believed were taking him to the Caribbean. Beginning as a humble indentured labourer he rose to become a sardar or plantation overseer, while also servicing the subaltern Indian community as a bona fide paṇḍit: indeed, one of the few in the colony to have received the acclaim from the Indian community of being an 'ardent Ārya dharma lecturer and debater'. He was instrumental - in collaboration with C. F. Andrews - in bringing to an end the horrendous indenture labour system in the colonies (often dubbed as 'the second abolition') which since its inception had effectively replaced the erstwhile slavery system.