Entangled Colonial Histories: Colonial Law and "Coolie" Intimacies in Twentieth-Century Malaya and Ceylon

• In Event: 117. Governing Intimate Encounters in South and Southeast Asia: Body, Sexuality, Gender, Everyday Life and Colonial/Post-Colonial Law

Abstract

There is a long history of similar (at times shared) colonial laws being used to govern migration policies and post-migration lives of Indian indentured laborers in Malaya and Ceylon. While remaining confined in different, but not unique, colonial contexts, the Indian migrant ‘coolies’ had similar experiences with the colonial law in their ‘private’ lives in Ceylon and Malaya. This paper focuses on how the colonial governments in Ceylon and Malaya collaborated to govern and regulate the Indian colonial labor force (in the respective colonies) and their domestic spaces, interpersonal life, marriages, and intimate relationships. Towards the same theme, the paper simultaneously explores how such colonial policies also created episodic opportunities for colonized labor force to articulate their resilience when their ‘domestic/marital’ cases were discussed in public spaces such as in courtrooms. Based on archival research, this paper thus examines the entangled histories between the colonies of the same Empire; in particular it addresses the questions - how were these communities treated by British Empire in different locations (Malaya and Ceylon), and what these two sites reveal about the regulation of intimacy and labor? In doing so, it analyzes the transnational interactions and influences between colonies of the same Imperial projects and attempts to complicate the widespread idea of “nations” or “regions” as a self-contained unit of analysis. Studying how the colonial governments of Ceylon and Malaya interacted, borrowed and collaborated to adopt similar legal policies to govern and regulate intimacies amongst immigrants, this paper unpacks the ‘given’ definitions of ‘South Asia’ and ‘Southeast Asia’ and explores the transnational and inter-Asia nature of the British Empire. Thus, the paper contributes to the overall understanding of the shared and connected transnational histories of Asia.

Author

• Arunima Datta, National University of Singapore