Journal of Discourse Review
Open Access Humanitarian scholarship
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Open Access Humanitarian scholarship
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Volume: 1 Issue: 1
1 Department of Humanities and Sciences, MLR Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India.
*Corresponding author: [email protected]
https://orcid.org/0009-0003-5264-1758
Year: 2025, Page: 32-45,
Received: Feb. 17, 2025 Accepted: March 31, 2025 Published: April 22, 2025
Indian Indentured Labour Immigration was conceived as an alternative stream of labour supply in the exigencies of abolition of slavery in the British empire. In their quest for the ideal labouring body, the imperial functionaries zoned in on the figure of the ‘Hill Coolie’, i.e. the indigenous inhabitants of the Chhotanagpur plateau as the ideal replacement for the African slave. Accorded with putative ‘primitive’ virtues of industriousness and superior physical strength in colonial ethnological deliberations, the ‘Hill Coolies’’ work efficiency was discussed as far as the British parliament in the 1830s. However, concerns regarding their high sickness and mortality in overseas voyages provided crucial caveats to this discourse. This paper examines the contradictory discursive framings of the ethnological construct of the hardy ‘hill cooly’ which was variedly played out and re-created multiple times in disparate migratory locations. This analysis considers how the broader political economy—including metropolitan capital, labour logistics, and disease transmission—shaped colonial ethnological discourse. Such a discourse always remained tentative, although the subjectivities it generated in the spaces of migration outlived it. The enduring label ‘tea tribes’, used to describe descendants of Chhotanagpur indentured migrants in Assam and North Bengal, reflects how colonial discourses continue to influence contemporary regional politics.
Keywords: Hill Coolie, Race, Tea Tribe, Indentured Immigration, Abolition, Colonial labour migration.
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