Postindentured and Postcolonial Citizenships in India and Former Crown Colonies

In 1947, India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru expressed his admiration for Indian emigrants eloquently: “How these Indians went abroad! Not even citizens of a free country, working under all possible disadvantages, yet they made good wherever they went … It is a romance, and it is something which India can be proud of.” But this romance was fickle since it was built on Nehru’s inorganic perspectives of Indian migrants (mostly indentured workers who left India in the nineteenth century to labor in British crown colonies such as Fiji, West Indies, and Mauritius). Soon in March 1948, Nehru declared unambiguously that “If [Indians in Fiji or Mauritius] are [not going to be Indian citizens], then our interest in them becomes cultural and humanitarian, not political.” His stance occasionally characterized the subtle role of territoriality in the Indian government’s perception of overseas Indians’ citizenship within and outside India. Indian indentured workers who had migrated to the abovementioned colonies, became Indian in new deterritorialized settings and constructed creolized identities distinctive from the identity of Indians in sub-continental India. This paper juxtaposes two types of discourses after 1947: the Indian government’s discourses of overseas Indians’ citizenship rights and post-indentured Indians’ discourses on Indianness and local citizenship in soon to be decolonized states of Fiji (1970) and Mauritius (1968). This analytical juxtaposition argues how multiple notions of postindentured and postcolonial citizenship(s) emerged after 1947 and how often such notions were contingently built on inorganic perceptions and misperceptions.