Kalathmika Natarajan, 'Histories of the "International": Caste, Migration and Indian Diplomacy'
In January 2018, the Government of India announced plans to issue a new category of orange-coloured passports for ‘unskilled’ Indians who had limited educational qualifications and required emigration clearance to travel to a group of 18 countries. This was to serve as a mechanism to differentiate them from ‘other’ Indians who would continue to have the traditional navy blue Indian passport. While the idea was shelved almost immediately, I argue that this scheme was a mere continuation of the Indian state’s longstanding view of the ‘international’ as a sanctified space for narrating Indianness, a task seemingly hampered by the ‘resilient coolie stain’ on India’s reputation. This paper seeks to recover the figure of the migrant in Indian diplomatic history – foregrounding the experience and afterlives of indenture as intrinsic to the making and practice of postcolonial Indian diplomacy. Tracing the vocabularies of indenture qua caste, it examines the production of upper caste and class Indian migrants as the most desirable representatives - their international presence deemed essential for India's attempts to move beyond what Jawaharlal Nehru once termed the ‘coolie ranks among nations.’
4pm GMT, Wednesday 4 November, via Teams. Access the virtual seminar space here.