British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, intercolonial relations and the Empire

By Kama Maclean

Commonwealth, curry and cricket' has become the belaboured phrase by which Australia seeks to emphasise its shared colonial heritage with India and improve bilateral relations in the process. Yet it is misleading because the legacy of empire differs in profound ways in both countries. Indians may be the fastest-growing group of migrants to Australia, but they have long been present. British India, White Australia explores connections between Australia and India through the lens of the British Empire, by tracing the lives of people of Indian descent in Australia, from Australian Federation to Indian independence. The White Australia Policy was firmly in place while both countries were part of the British Empire. Australia was nominally self-governing but still attached very strongly to Britain; India was driven by the desire for independence. The racist immigration policies of dominions like Australia, and Britain' s inability to reform them, further animated nationalist sentiments in India. Kama Maclean has undertaken extensive archival research in all three countries and the book includes cartoons and photographs, many of them shocking, that reflect attitudes of the time. In this original, landmark work she calls for more meaningful dialogue and acknowledgment of the constraints placed upon Indians in Australia and those attempting to immigrate. The force of white imperialism was strong: some Australians may have found solidarity with the cause of Indian nationalism, but at the point British India ceased to exist, White Australia remained steadfast.Indians are now the fastest-growing group of migrants in Australia, yet their presence has a long history, as told in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Mar 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781742244754

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BRITISH

INDIA,

WHITE

AUSTRALIA

KAMA MACLEAN is Professor of South Asian and World History at the University of New South Wales and editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. She is the author of Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad and A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, image, voice and text. Kama is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Australia India Institute. Publication of the images in this book was made possible by a subvention from the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

BRITISH

INDIA,

WHITE

AUSTRALIA

Overseas Indians, intercolonial relations and the empire

Kama Maclean

A UNSW Press book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Kama Maclean 2020

First published 2020

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

ISBN       9781742236216 (paperback)

9781742244754 (ebook)

9781742249254 (ePDF)

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Nada Backovic

Cover image Lucca Singh’s Certificate Exempting from Dictation Test, National

Archives of Australia, J2483, 385/28.

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Commonality in the commonwealth

1British Indian subjects and the White Australia policy, 1901–15

2A visual history of Indians in Australia, 1890–1930

3Sovereignty, race and inequality within the empire, 1897–1915

4Imperial loyalty, war and the question of rights, 1915–22

5Dominions, delegations and India’s claim for equal status, 1919–30

6Indian nationalism in Australia, 1928–43

7Fault lines in early diplomatic relations, 1944–47

Conclusion: Whiteness, Britishness and the commonwealth

Acknowledgments

Acronyms

A note on spelling

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Preface

By strange coincidence, 26 January each year marks public holidays celebrating Republic Day in India and Australia Day. But the reasons for these national celebrations diverge widely. Republic Day commemorates the day in 1930 when the Indian National Congress, just prior to Gandhi launching the Civil Disobedience movement, coordinated nation-wide flag raising ceremonies that declared the intention to demand complete independence from Britain. Australia Day, by contrast, celebrates the arrival of British settlers in Australia, and so marks the invasion of the continent. That is confirmed now by a strong current of public opinion that seeks a change of date to reduce the offence to Australia’s First Peoples. It might be said, then, that the complexity in the British Commonwealth connection between India and Australia is most starkly problematised by the differing origins of 26 January celebrations. In India’s case, it signals a movement for freedom from the British.¹ In Australia’s, it is a celebration of their arrival. That stark divergence speaks of two very different relationships with our respective colonial legacies: the commonwealth connection carries very different meanings for each country.

Paradoxically, much has been and continues to be made of that commonwealth connection. The alliterative mantra of ‘Commonwealth, Curry and Cricket’ is so repeatedly invoked by Australian policymakers and journalists that in diplomatic circles it is referred to commonly as ‘the three Cs’ of Australia–India relations.² Those three Cs have carried the burden of the bilateral relationship, forged after India’s decolonisation in 1947. Yet the dogged emphasis on ultra-competitive sport, misnamed masalas and colonial inheritances has comprehensively failed to build the rapport so desired by successive Australian governments.³ The reliance on that odd trio to set the terms of the bilateral relationship with India remains profoundly limiting because they are framed in terms set by Australia. As such, they do not form a strong basis for dialogue or cooperation.

A detailed consideration of the prehistory of the India–Australia bilateral relationship, from 1901 to 1947, forged under conditions created and managed by the British Empire, suggests that raising the colonial connection might not be particularly diplomatic at all. Some of the institutional and structural inheritances are undoubtedly similar, a product of colonial contrivance; others are rather trivial. Rumour has it, for example, that a kerfuffle in London led to the switching of plans for Flinders Street Station in Melbourne with those of the Victoria Terminus in Bombay. The story has not been proven, but it is not inconceivable. Whether such colonial coincidences are meaningful for Australia–India relations is another matter. This book will argue that it is time that we moved beyond the three Cs in order to reach a more insightful and meaningful dialogue.

In 2000, Brian Stoddart mounted a strong argument for why Australia and India can never be ‘joined by cricket’.⁴ Yet cricket remains as the bedrock upon which first- and second-track diplomacy stands. When I first started travelling to India in the late 1980s, the discovery that I was Australian was invariably followed by a long and enthusiastic discussion about cricket. I resigned myself to taking an interest in the game. However, while watching the ‘Monkeygate’ scandal unfold at the Sydney Cricket Ground in January 2008, in which an admittedly colourful Panjabi swear word was mistaken for a racial taunt,⁵ I could not help wondering why anyone could consider cricket to be a point of commonality.⁶ Ranjitsinhji, England’s star Indian prince batsman, who was sledged by Australian crowds in the late nineteenth century, might have agreed.⁷ Ranji’s nephew KS Duleepsinhji made a substantial impact after playing for England against Australia in the 1920s; he returned to visit in the 1930s and 1940s.⁸ Of course, it is not all bad. India’s third High Commissioner to Australia was the cricketing prince MS Duleepsinhji. Over the course of his career, Brett Lee seamlessly went from bowling express pace deliveries at Indian batsmen to crooning with Asha Bhosle. In 2015, he starred opposite Tannishtha Chatterjee in a Hindi film directed by Anupam Sharma, UnIndian. On balance, though, Ramachandra Guha notes, ‘cricketing relations between the two countries are intense and increasingly rivalrous’.⁹

Curry, too, is decidedly unhelpful in bringing together India and Australia. Indeed, a debate exists about whether the word ‘curry’ can even be considered Indian. As a word unilaterally applied to a range of Indian dishes by the British, curry bears deeply colonial connotations and, indeed, is more likely to be invoked in contemporary Britain, where it something of a national dish, than in India.¹⁰ Ravi Palat notes that in Britain, ‘the popularity of Indian food … led to an easy assimilation of immigrants from South Asia’, but he demonstrates that racism frequently came along with its consumption in ‘curry houses’ in England from the 1970s.¹¹ In Australian parlance, curry has been used to invoke negative associations and build slurs, both in the past and very recent present.¹² Research on multiculturalism in Australia has demonstrated extensively that consumption of a (substantially modified) foodstuff is not a reliable indication of acceptance of the culture from which it was drawn.¹³ Not long after the attacks on Indian students in Melbourne in 2009–10, the then Victorian Premier, John Brumby, attempted to marry cricket and curry by organising a Vindaloo Against Violence Day, nominating Shane Warne as a new cultural ambassador for Australia–India relations. ‘A short perusal of Indian-Australian cricket history’, write Tom Heenan and David Dunstan of Brumby’s campaign, might have warned against this, revealing ‘a story consisting of mainly racial and cultural arrogance on Australia’s part’.¹⁴

The argument mounted in this book is that the third C of Australia–India relations – the British Commonwealth connection – is the most divisive of all. The commonwealth itself is historically a loosely defined institution; the word was first applied to describe the relationship between Britain and its colonies in the nineteenth century. The commonwealth, as we know it today, was heavily shaped in the postwar, postcolonial moment, and crucially, in the climate of the Cold War. Despite this, it drew heavily on the precedents set by Britain and its self-governing settler colonies, later known as the dominions. Tellingly, the language most frequently used to describe the relationships within the commonwealth in the early twentieth century was familial, framing Britain as the mother country to a set of adolescent siblings, who mostly cooperated, held together by mandatory annual family gatherings – the Colonial and later Imperial Conferences – to which Indian members were not invited, until after the Great War.

The focus of British India, White Australia is on the difficult histories that have marked Australia’s approaches to India through the framework of the empire, and later the commonwealth. Australia’s relationship to Britain and the empire has been variable, but few would disagree that in much of the early twentieth century Australia strained against the ‘colonial–imperial’ relationship dictated by Britain.¹⁵ So did India; however, they rarely did this in concert, or for the same reasons. For much of the early century, Australia’s objective seemed to be to maintain its immigration policy, which had the effect of resisting India’s claims for equality within the empire. I will return to this point later; for now I will simply note that from the interwar period the historical language used to denote Britain’s self-governing colonies – the ‘dominions’ – was frequently prefaced with the adjective ‘white’, a discursive manoeuvre that firmly excluded India.

In its focus on imperial and Australian histories, British India, White Australia is something of a departure from my earlier work, which focused on anticolonialism, political violence and social communication in late colonial India.¹⁶ Working on these projects, I had spent some fifteen years in colonial archives researching the dynamics between British imperialism and Indian anticolonialism in the subcontinent. Despite a critical eye for nationalism, I was insufficiently post-nationalist myself to fail to be surprised when a stray Australian reference crossed my desk in archives in London or New Delhi. I turned to this work in an attempt to make an intervention following the attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney in 2009– 10.¹⁷ When the news reporting on attacks on Indian students in Australia began to escalate in 2009, I was living and working in Al Ain, a sunny oasis town in Abu Dhabi, working as a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of the United Arab Emirates. From there, I could not closely follow the reactions and responses to the attacks in the Australian public sphere on current affairs shows and talkback radio, or on what were then nascent social media platforms (which in any case were periodically blocked). But I was travelling to New Delhi every month, where the Indian public was rightly animated by the attacks, indignant at the tendency of Australian politicians and commentators to dismiss them as isolated or opportunistic incidents, as opposed to expressions of racism. This denial began to shred Australia–India relations. Scholars of the Challenging Race project at the University of Western Sydney suggested that this denial may have been linked to the substantial dependence of the Australian economy on international students.¹⁸ The critical race theorist Alana Lentin, however, notes that ‘deflection, distancing and denial are the three Ds of post-racial racism management’.¹⁹

In August 2009, I attended the inauguration of the Australia– India Institute by Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard in New Delhi, and in February 2010, I returned to Australia to resume my role at UNSW, which hosted a node of the Australia–India Institute. I felt the need to turn my research project to a topic germane to the Institute’s implicit concerns: rebuilding Australia–India relations. At the end of 2011, the Institute provided me with a seed grant to fund research on the people-to-people relations that persisted between Indians and Australians, despite the strictures of the White Australia policy, in the early twentieth century. The scope of the project rapidly grew as I began my research, and I applied to the Australian Research Council for further support, pledging to fix Australia–India relations with history. The project was granted in 2012, under the name ‘Imagining India in White Australia: Intercolonial Relations and the Empire’ (DP 120102053). This book is one of the outcomes of that project.²⁰ I was fortunate to complete the book while a Fellow at the National Library of Australia in 2019 supported by the Harold S Williams Trust; this gave me the opportunity to delve into the Library’s rich India collection, including the Casey papers. However, I would like to acknowledge that the bulk of this project was written on unceded Bedegal land.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in the last ten years India has overtaken New Zealand to become the third largest country of origin for overseas-born residents in Australia, after the UK and China.²¹ British India, White Australia aims to provide a window into the longer history of this community, and of early twentieth-century Australia’s connections and disconnections with India, which resonated long after the White Australia policy was implemented in 1901, and dismantled in the 1970s. My father, Colin Maclean, recalls meeting an Indian lascar (‘the first black man I ever saw’), on the SS Strathnaver (circa 1950, although he warned me against using the term ‘lascar’, because it was racist).²² A snapshot of the meeting, taken during a lifeboat drill by my grandfather (Image 1) – speaks volumes of the whiteness of the Australia he grew up in, the legacies of which are very much with us today.

Image 1. Colin and a lascar, c. 1950. Photograph: Alan Maclean.

SOURCE Author’s collection.

INTRODUCTION

Commonality in the commonwealth

This is a book about an awkward triangular dynamic that developed between Britain, India and Australia in the early twentieth century, and some of the people who got caught up in it. In contemporary bilateral relations, great emphasis has been placed on India’s and Australia’s historical connection with the British Commonwealth. The stress laid on a shared past is deeply misleading, however, for each colony was tied to Britain in the early twentieth century under very different conditions. Both, it is true, strained against the imperial embrace, but the respective forms of colonisation, collaboration with and resistance against the empire diverge widely. At the beginning of the twentieth century, each colony pulled in a different direction. As a settler society geographically isolated from Britain, newly self-governing and freshly assertive, in 1901 Australia passed the Immigration Restriction Act, informally known as the White Australia policy, effectively preventing the further migration of non-white settlers. At the same time, there were strong impulses in Australia to take part in the colonial project, an avid consumption of imperial culture and lobbying for Australian boys to be able to enter the Indian Civil Service. Meanwhile in India, nationalists across a number of movements and deploying a range of ideologies were struggling to problematise and moderate the same imperial project.

Cosmopolitan sentiments among white Australians that manifested as a pro-India ethos existed in organisations such as the Theosophical Society, and by the 1920s among the organised left.¹ These made an impact, but they were relatively marginal strains in political culture in the early twentieth century. Not until the 1940s was Australian public opinion substantially dented by organisations expressing support for Indian aspirations for independence; and these were countered by criticisms and extensive parodies of Gandhi, who dared to take on the British Empire during the Second World War, splashed in the media.² Jim Masselos recalls that there was little trace of India in 1950s Australia, and that many ‘attitudes and approaches to it were subsumed within wider processes and developments ostensibly only tangentially about India and more about reinforcing dominant ideas about Australian nationhood’.³ Race, as seen in the distorted rending of Gandhi in Image 2, was central to these.

Australian public culture in the early twentieth century resonated with enthusiastic support for imperialism. Australian readers hungrily devoured the writings of Rudyard Kipling, the bard of Anglo-India whose relationship with imperialism was certainly complicated, but whose pronouncements ‘on the distinctive character of races and the gulf between cultures’ on balance positioned India in a subordinate role in the imperial order.⁴ From 1890 to 1920, Kipling was one of the most popular authors in Australia, particularly among male readers, who ‘had no reservations about Kipling’s nationalism and imperialism’.⁵ Indeed, the White Australia policy was perfectly consistent with Kipling’s proverbial White Man’s Burden. Australia not only imagined itself as part of a white world order but, as Deana Heath has shown in her book on moral regulation in the empire, it revelled in the opportunity to render itself ‘purer, cleaner and whiter than Britain’.⁶ Here, Australia’s complicated relationship with Britain became most evident; it both pushed towards Britain and its empire and also leaned away, intent on asserting an independent identity.⁷

Image 2. ‘Ghandi [sic]: Go away! I want to try my passive resistance on this tiger!’

SOURCE Smith’s Weekly, 25 July 1942, p. 2.

In the early twentieth century, Australia had positioned itself among a coterie of self-governing settler colonies that assertively framed themselves as ‘white dominions’, in doing so proclaiming their otherness from British colonies that were not yet deemed capable of sensible governance. This concept was literally set in stone in New Delhi. When Edward Lutyens’ grand colonial capital was completed in the early 1930s, four ‘Dominion Pillars’ were installed in the forecourt of the Secretariat Building. These pillars were styled as gifts from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, intended to be both a gesture of goodwill, but also a reminder of a model of governance – Dominion Status – for Indians to aspire to.⁸ Ironically, as the columns were being installed, the Indian National Congress at its annual meeting in Lahore at the end of 1929 voted to abandon aspirations for Dominion Status, in favour of complete independence. This decision reflected a radicalisation of Indian politics, but also a realisation that India would not be accepted as an equal dominion, because it was not white.

The impact of the White Australia policy in India

There is an extensive literature on the White Australia policy, but there has been relatively little analysis of how the White Australia policy was received in India, either by the Government of India, or by Indian nationalists.⁹ Australia was not often a topic of discussion in the Indian public sphere, but when it was, it was almost invariably in the form of criticism of its immigration restriction policies. By 1910, the plight of overseas Indians had begun to gain pace in nationalist circles as an effective lens through which to problematise British promises of equality in the empire. From the late 1870s, the Government of India compiled weekly reports that translated articles from the Indian-owned press on topics of concern, as a way of monitoring public opinion. Political grievances about the maltreatment of Indians overseas were regularly collected as a part of this project. These are indicative of opinions in India about Australia, which were, by the mid-twentieth century, consistently critical: ‘Indians saw the White Australia policy as demonstrating a permanent characteristic of Australia’.¹⁰

By contrast, the dominant discourse about India reverberating in Australia in the late nineteenth century was of a hapless, barren land ravaged by perpetual famine.¹¹ Such ideas about famine were perpetuated in Australia by campaigns to raise funds for victims of the Madras famine of 1876–77, which were productive of sympathy in some quarters, but this was ‘predicated on distance’.¹² Such sympathy did little to produce pro-immigration sentiments, despite the presence of several proponents advocating the relocation of Indians to northern Australia, whose tropical climate was thought to be unconducive to white settlement, as a means of populating the territory and reducing famine death.¹³ Famine narratives remained central to understandings of India in Australia. In 1915, an Indian newspaper reported that ‘A little school girl in Australia, asked what was the staple food of Indians, answered famine’.¹⁴

By contrast, Australia was viewed in India as part of the larger imperial web that created the conditions for widespread poverty, by withholding the solution to Indian population pressures. Amid extensive debate about how to address recurrent famines in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were calls by Indian nationalists – from Radhakamal Mukerjee to MK Gandhi – for Australia to allow Indians to settle in the Northern Territory.¹⁵ Gandhi had remarked, as early as 1906, that Australia’s ‘under-population’ was unsustainable and that it presented a natural opening for Indian migration.¹⁶ Naturally, such arguments failed to gain traction in Australia, but the idea was a tenacious one. In 1944, the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, was shown a proposal for the ‘settlement of discharged Indian soldiers on land in Northern Australia … with the idea of providing for the defence of N. Australia’.¹⁷ Both Wavell and Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India, were doubtful of the viability of the scheme, with Amery adding that it would merely ‘open the door to all kind of unpleasantness we have already had over South Africa’.¹⁸ A year later, at the end of the war, Wavell wrote to the Australian High Commissioner in Delhi, Sir Iven Mackay, proposing that not only Indian soldiers but also Anglo-Indians be allowed to settle in ‘tropical Australia’, only to be assured that there was no chance of the plan’s acceptance.¹⁹ The news of this rebuttal took over a year to leak to the Indian press, which widely reported the insult: ‘Will tense situation develop between Australia and India? White Policy Challenged’.²⁰

Until its demise in the 1970s, the White Australia policy formed a substantial barrier in both formal and people-to-people relationships between Australia and India.²¹ There were a great many Australians who passed through India in the twentieth century, for India was an extended field of action for professional socialites who dashed to Delhi to witness the Imperial Durbar; for women ‘fishing’ for suitable husbands; for ambitious missionaries; business entrepreneurs; artists, litterateurs and dancers; and members of the Theosophical Society, among others.²² Knowledge of the White Australia policy in India almost invariably undermined social interactions.²³ The historian Barun De recalls that Australians frequently exceeded Britons in their hauteur, recalling that on a passage from India to England with his father in March 1939, ‘the Australians would not talk to any – there were several upper-class Indians on this ship – but the Australians wouldn’t mix’.²⁴ Fortunately, not all were quite so hostile. Phyllis Hall, who in the 1920s enjoyed some fame in the Melbourne bohemian set as one of Norman Lindsay’s muses, was stationed in India with her husband in 1942. Flattered to be invited to attend a birthday party for the Prince of Nawanagar, she was then embarrassed to be confronted by the prince after the dinner banquet about the White Australia policy. She wrote in her memoirs decades later that ‘the very name [of the policy] appeared to be offensive to the Indian people, and I am very pleased that it no longer exists’.²⁵ An Indian newspaper editor in the 1940s attested that the controversial policy was ‘practically the only thing we have known in the past about Australia’.²⁶ Alexander Yarwood, who wrote extensively about the policy and about India, noted that this resentment ‘was still clear enough when I lived in India in 1964’.²⁷ Similarly, Robin Jeffrey reflects that in 1960s India, when he was teaching as part of a program implemented by the Canadian University Service Overseas, the term ‘White Australia’ served to denote a racially constituted geographical territory, and not a policy at all.²⁸

Race was ultimately the ordering principle that justified making Australia white and keeping India British. And yet British governments, in London and in New Delhi, frequently saw little problem in criticising white Australia while upholding the principles of British India. The persistence of racially based immigration restriction among the white dominions presented an impossible challenge to the British, who liked to project a sense of equality within the imperium. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have demonstrated that their ultimate acquiescence to the white dominions was tantamount to the ‘betrayal of the idea of imperial citizenship’ in the late nineteenth century,²⁹ noting the impetus this gave to activists, most notably Gandhi, in South Africa.³⁰

Both a little and a lot has been written about the histories of South Asians in Australia. Books about the Indian community in Australia tend to be weighted towards particular states, notably New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia.³¹ Other studies tend to approach the topic through the prism of their subjects’ religious community; Muslim, Hindu or Sikh.³² The richness of this subject area is indicated by popular books that detail early connections between India and Australia, from the ‘surprising’ history of Australian investments in the British Raj, to romantic narratives of affect between Australians and Indians.³³

Overwhelmingly, however, the bulk of the scholarship has taken the form of research articles that approach the topic through the prism of biography or microhistory. Outstanding here are the contributions of Margaret Allen, comprising a series of articles addressing the experiences of individuals whose conditions were so constrained by the White Australia policy.³⁴ Across a series of articles, Nadia Rhook has approached the early Indian diaspora in Australia through the lens of critical races studies, sound studies, and the study of settler colonialism, making valuable interventions to understandings about masculinity, intimacy and white vulnerability.³⁵ These projects draw on and extend earlier work of Australia–India connections in the Indian Ocean region.³⁶

Samia Khatun’s recent Australianama represents the most substantial scholarly intervention into this space. Khatun guides readers through an epic journey of discovery and necessary conjecture as she traces the possible routes and trajectories that led to a Bengali book of Sufi poetry being deposited in a mosque in Broken Hill, where many decades later it became revered as a copy of the holy Koran. Each chapter draws on a range of evidence to imagine a different route, and a different series of readers who might have brought the songs to outback Australia.³⁷ Khatun’s work breaks fresh methodological and historiographical ground, deftly inscribing a history of South Asian presence in Australia which is sensitive to questions of gender and attentive to interactions with Indigenous Australians, defying a tendency to read South Asians in Australia as so many men contributing to settlement, and therefore complicit in the process of dispossession.

Alongside these contributions from scholars working within Australian Studies there is also a sizeable body of edited collections and journal special issues dedicated to Australia–India connections.³⁸ A notable feature of this work is that much of it has been written by scholars who primarily work within the rubric of South Asian Studies, who have encountered compelling materials about Australia in South Asian archives, or who have been moved to intervene in contemporary debates about the state of Australia–India relations.³⁹

However, the relative paucity of single, sole-authored texts on the history of British Indians in Australia that is grounded in South Asian, imperial and Australian histories has deprived these areas of an overarching or connected set of narratives. This is, in part, what the present book proposes to achieve. By drawing attention to the political dynamics established between British India and White Australia, mediated by the British Empire, the book seeks to open up conversations between these fields, as well as contribute to a growing body of research on the Indian diaspora, which has lately flourished in Britain,⁴⁰ North America,⁴¹ South Africa and New Zealand.⁴² By comparison, the relatively small population of Indians in Australia in the early twentieth century has generated a correspondingly small field.⁴³

The considerable body of scholarship on the White Australia policy has looked at its impact on Asian migration, migrants and foreign relations.⁴⁴ On balance, the weight of analysis has largely fallen on the Chinese in Australia, as unquestionably the largest community affected.⁴⁵ Until relatively recently, with the pioneering work of Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, scholars have tended to approach the White Australia policy largely through the lens of Australian Studies, and to a lesser extent, Imperial History.⁴⁶ Viewing the White Australia policy through the frameworks of South Asian Studies, a field noted for its multidisciplinary and postcolonial critique, throws up additional insights and draws our attention to transnational synergies.

Immigration restriction policies inspired anticolonial resistance from not only Gandhi in South Africa but also far more radical transnational political movements. The insurrectionary Ghadar Party, for example, based in North America, was in part inspired by the Government of India’s intimation to the Canadian Government in 1908 that it could ‘take the necessary steps to defend the whiteness of its shores without being too obvious’ in its racial discrimination, in this case by setting a prohibitively expensive fee for British Indians wishing to land.⁴⁷ This would ultimately lead to the Komagata Maru incident in 1914, which began as a standoff between Vancouver immigration officials and 376 Indian migrants seeking to land in Canada. The Komagata Maru was eventually forcibly returned to Calcutta, where the ship was boarded by British authorities who opened fire, and in the fray twenty passengers, two Britons, two local residents and two Indian policemen were killed.⁴⁸ This incident, dragging out over months and across several oceans before ending in a violent clash, would radicalise Indian nationalists from Lahore to San Francisco, making Indian anticolonialism an international event. Responding to the incident in 1916, Sir Rabindranath Tagore, who achieved global fame after winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, declared he would not visit Canada,⁴⁹ and when pressed, confirmed that he would not visit Australia either.⁵⁰

British Indians in White Australia

Unassisted migrants from India began to arrive in the Australian colonies in substantial numbers from the 1880s. According to figures compiled by the India Office, by 1891 there were 5237 Indian residents, mostly working as cameleers, hawkers, farmers and labourers (Table 1). Most came from the greater Punjab and the North-Western Frontier provinces, with some hailing from the Bengal and Madras Presidencies, as trailblazing migrants tested the opportunities in the colonies, setting in motion a chain of migration. After 1901, further migration of Indians to Australia was minimal, as almost no fresh arrivals were permitted. In addition to limitations placed by immigration, federal and state legislation in Australia placed substantial limitations on the lives of Indians who had been resident prior to Federation. The labour movement had lobbied for and achieved laws restricting ‘Asiatics’ from working across a range of industries, including furniture manufacturing, sugar, hospitality and mining in most states, with Western Australia and Queensland at the fore.⁵¹ Such harsh measures and the hostility that shaped them led to a substantial depletion of the Indian community in Australia, with many permanently returning to the subcontinent within the first two decades of Federation.

Table 1. Numbers of British Indians in Australia, 1891–1921

* Figures for South Australia include ‘Singhalese’.

# These figures do not include ‘Full-blooded’ Indigenous people, who were not counted. Data from this column is