Identity Transformation Among Indian Emigrants Under Colonial Rule

When millions of Indians left their homeland under colonial rule – as indentured laborers bound for the Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius, and South Africa, or as traders and professionals dispersed across the British Empire – they did not simply change their address. They entered a process of profound identity disruption. Old markers of selfhood – caste, language, village, religious ritual – were stripped away, challenged, or made impossible to maintain. Yet out of this displacement emerged something new: reconstructed identities that were neither purely Indian nor entirely shaped by the host society, but something more layered and resilient than either alone.

The colonial context that uprooted identity 🔗

Identity is rarely something people think about until it is threatened. For Indian emigrants under colonial rule, that threat was immediate. With nearly 18 million nationals abroad today, India claims the world’s largest diaspora – and the roots of that diaspora stretch directly back to the colonial period, when the British Empire systematically relocated Indian workers to its far-flung territories. Following the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, the British, Dutch, and French empires transported millions of Indians as indentured laborers to work on plantations, railways, and infrastructure projects worldwide. These were not migrants with the freedom to choose their conditions. They were, in most cases, people uprooted by economic collapse, famine, and colonial exploitation – and then transplanted into environments that treated their culture, language, and social structures as obstacles rather than assets.

The initial rupture: what was lost 🔗

The first phase of identity transformation was one of loss. Emigrants arriving at colonial plantations found that the social world they had known in India – structured by caste, kinship, language, and local religious practice – had no direct equivalent in their new setting.

Language as a marker of belonging 🔗

Language was one of the most immediate casualties. Indians stationed in Mauritius and deported to further lands were not allowed to speak in their local language or practice their religion – it was as if their entire past life was being erased. In many colonies, workers were compelled to learn colonial languages – English, French, Dutch, or Portuguese – simply to function. Over generations, younger emigrants adopted these as primary languages while older generations held on to their native tongues. The loss of language was not merely practical; it severed the thread connecting people to oral traditions, religious texts, and the cultural memory embedded in their mother tongue.

Caste under pressure 🔗

Caste, one of the most defining aspects of Indian social identity, was also profoundly disrupted by emigration. In India, caste had governed marriage, occupation, social interaction, and religious practice. On the ships and plantation colonies, that structure became impossible to maintain in its traditional form. As scholar Vijay Mishra observed, the jahaji bhai (“ship-brotherhood”) confraternity led to social configurations not unlike village networks in India – but far more radical, because this was the first space where Indian laborers had to confront the reality of losing caste as a consequence of crossing the kala pani (the black sea). Crossing the ocean was itself considered ritually polluting in Hindu tradition, meaning that emigration symbolically broke caste boundaries before any social restructuring even began.

Jahaji bhai: forging a new social order on the water 🔗

Out of displacement came invention. Before Indian emigrants even arrived at their colonial destinations, the long sea voyage itself became a crucible for new forms of social bonding. Indian-origin laborers referred to one another as jahāzī bhai (ship brother) or jahāzī behen (ship sister), reflecting the brotherly and sisterly bonds made on their voyage from India. This was not a minor informal arrangement – it was a fundamental restructuring of social ties. People from different castes, different linguistic communities, and different regions of India were packed onto the same vessels, dependent on each other for survival.

The jahajibhai bond – meaning “shipmates” – signaled forms of brotherhood that transcended laborers’ condition as workers. In a context where traditional caste hierarchies had lost their enforcing mechanisms, shared suffering created new forms of kinship. The terms jahaji bhai and dipua bhai (depot brotherhood) were cementing factors that, beyond caste, religion, and language, created a globalized feeling of being part of the Indian diaspora. This new social solidarity, forged in hardship, became the foundation for the communities Indian emigrants would go on to build in their host countries.

Reconstruction: building identity in the new land 🔗

The loss of familiar structures did not result in a permanent vacuum. Indian emigrants demonstrated remarkable capacity for cultural reconstruction – rebuilding a sense of self and community through the institutions and practices available to them in their new environments.

Religion as an anchor 🔗

Religion became one of the most powerful tools of identity reconstruction. During the British Raj, “Indian” identity often revolved around colonial readings of religion, as Britain created a spatial order to facilitate administration and control. But for emigrants themselves, religious practice served a very different purpose – it was a means of continuity and self-definition in an alien landscape. Women played a particularly important role in keeping culture alive: deployed mainly in domestic work, they passed on a cultural legacy to future generations through stories and music. Temples, mosques, and gurudwaras became community institutions – not only sites of worship but centers of social life, education, and mutual support. Despite the hardships, indentured laborers managed to preserve their cultural identity, contributing to their host countries’ linguistic, religious, and culinary diversity.

Community organizations and collective belonging 🔗

As Indian communities became more established in their host countries, formal and informal associations emerged to maintain cultural connection and collective identity. In Europe, “circles of friends” brought Indians together to form associations that jointly created feelings of belonging to Indian cultural heritage and of keeping relations with India. These groups were not merely nostalgic clubs. They created rules, enforced norms, and provided the social scaffolding through which a community could define itself and transmit its values across generations. Festivals such as Diwali, Holi, and Eid became anchors of communal life – public performances of cultural memory that asserted Indian identity in the face of colonial pressure to assimilate.

Hybridization: neither here nor there, but both 🔗

Perhaps the most sociologically significant outcome of the diasporic experience was the emergence of hybrid identities – forms of selfhood that blended Indian cultural roots with the influences of host societies. This was not assimilation; it was creative synthesis under conditions of structural inequality.

In the Caribbean, Indian emigrants fused traditional music, dance, and food with elements of Afro-Caribbean culture, giving rise to new art forms such as chutney music and Indo-Caribbean dance. In South Africa, the Indian diaspora developed a distinct “Indian-African” cultural identity. The caste system itself underwent transformation in the diaspora – functioning more as an ethnic identity marker than a rigid occupational hierarchy, with subcaste (jati) identities gradually dissolving and giving way to broader groupings. In some plantation colonies, the intermingling of people from different castes even produced new religious and cultural formations that had no direct equivalent back in India.

This hybridization was not a betrayal of Indian identity – it was a survival strategy and, in time, a form of cultural vitality. Emigrants adopted elements of colonial and local culture (dress, education, language) as necessary tools of navigation, while simultaneously retaining the practices and values they considered most essential. The result was an identity that was layered and contextual: Indian at the temple, creolized at the market, formally colonial in the workplace.

Caste reconstructed: old hierarchies in new settings 🔗

The story of identity reconstruction was not uniformly progressive. While jahaji bhai bonds temporarily dissolved caste distinctions on the ships, caste proved resilient once communities settled in host countries. In British Guiana, after Indian indentured laborers arrived in the Caribbean in 1838, religious and caste identities paradoxically rose among them – with Brahminical temples and patriarchal institutions re-inventing caste-based social hierarchies in the plantation colonies. The process of labeling and categorization that started in the British Raj intensified caste identities in ways that continue to this day. Caste, in many diaspora communities, became re-encoded as an ethnic or cultural marker – governing marriage patterns, social networks, and community inclusion – even in societies where its occupational basis had entirely disappeared.

The legacy: identity that outlasted empire 🔗

The identity transformations that occurred among Indian emigrants under colonial rule did not end with the indenture system or with Indian independence. They produced lasting social formations – cultures, institutions, art forms, and community structures – that continue to define Indian diaspora communities around the world today. The Indian diaspora has evolved for more than a century in response to global labor demands and geopolitical events, but its foundational patterns – the negotiation between cultural preservation and adaptation, the construction of community institutions in unfamiliar settings, the creation of hybrid identities – were all set in motion during the colonial period. The girmitiyas who crossed the kala pani were not just moving their bodies to new places; they were, under extreme duress, building new worlds of meaning.

What do you think? How does the concept of jahaji bhai – identity forged through shared hardship rather than shared origin – challenge our usual assumptions about what holds a community together? And to what extent do you think hybrid diasporic identities represent a genuine synthesis, as opposed to a response to the loss of something irreplaceable?

References

1. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/india-migration-country-profile
2. https://globalindiannetwork.com/history-of-migration-from-india/
3. https://theprint.in/feature/around-town/british-tricked-indians-into-boarding-slavery-ships-now-mauritius-speaks-hindi-bhojpuri/1911565/
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027841652500011X
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girmitiyas
6. https://retrospectjournal.com/2024/11/03/beyond-servitude-uncovering-agency-community-and-resistance-in-indian-indentured-labour/
7. https://www.mea.gov.in/images/pdf/ethnicityanddiasporicidentity.pdf
8. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11104739/
9. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10764722/
10. https://www.academia.edu/34860296/Caste_as_Cosmopolitanism_in_Diaspora