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This book uncovers how indentured labourers forged independent India's foreign relations

Scroll | July 21, 2026 1:40 PM CST

You … may be largely acquainted with the Indian ‘coolie’ as he is called with some contempt. It is true perhaps because India herself has sunk to the coolie ranks among nations, and perhaps that contempt is justified, but remember that if India has gone down, she has also the vitality to rise again.

Speaking to Indian communities during a tour of Malaya, Ceylon, and Burma in 1937, Jawaharlal Nehru articulated a vision of India’s place in the emerging international order that was inescapably intertwined with the figure of the benighted “coolie.” The coolie had long been a spectre of anxiety for nationalist elites – the migration of millions of labourers across the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean in the 19th and early 20th centuries through systems of indenture and state regulation had seemingly tarnished India’s reputation and held a mirror to its subjugated, emasculated, and colonised status. Such damage could apparently only be resolved by redefining who could access and represent India in the international realm.

The birth of Indian diplomacy would go hand in hand with efforts to end indenture and curtail the prolific if undesirable mobility of the coolie, in defiance of calls by caste-oppressed communities who asserted their...