ABSTRACT
The migration of Indian ‘coolies’ (kuli)1 has been at the top of the economic, social and lately also labour agenda of South Asian historians since the last decade of the twentieth century. Scholars from around the world have contributed to the emerging field of mobility and migration with special reference to the ‘indentured labourer’, as the Indian kuli was judicially termed.2 Some books on Indian migration had appeared on the academic market in the 1970s and early 1980s and yet were hardly noticed.3 Two reasons may be responsible for this. First, as an academic subject migration remained restricted to the trans-Atlantic world until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War in 1992. Second, the Indian government’s politics of economic liberalisation introduced by Rajiv Gandhi at the end of the 1980s encouraged Indian migration overseas with a consequent increase in remittances sent back home. These remittances became an important factor in the country’s economic and fiscal system amounting up to 3 per cent of annual GDP at the end of the twentieth century. The same is true for other South Asian countries, particularly Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.4
