Appendix

International migrants in Malaya frequently engaged in social and associational activities, often leading to the growth of what may be termed a diasporic civil society. Civil society organisations created a public space in urban areas to secure their interests and represent themselves through various activities, including social services, acts of community solidarity, policy advocacy and cultural activities. Each generation of migrants made its imprint by creating new organisations or promoting existing ones. The Bangla-speaking diaspora shared a similar historical process for space-making in Malaysia and Singapore. The previous chapter focused on Bengali place-making from the lens of political organisations and activism. This chapter explores further Bengali contributions to place-making from the vantage point of civil society, including associational and other activities. The binary processes of globalisation, that is, ‘globalization of the local’ and ‘localization of the global’, could help to articulate the role and engagement of Bengali migrants in the local and international sphere, especially since the end of WWI.

Bengali Civic Spaces within the South Asian Diaspora

During the early twentieth century, South Asian transnational communities formed different organisations under the umbrella term ‘Indian’ mainly for three reasons. First, despite different ethnic backgrounds, the Indian diasporic communities were open to forging cooperation. The Bengalis, among other diverse South Asian migrants, played a vital role in forming organisations and associations of a social and religious nature. For example, Hindu migrants disseminated the idea of reforming Hinduism in Malaya. S. N. Bardhan, a Bengali, was a founding member of the Arya Samaj Sangam, established in 1910. Later, he served as its president from 1911 to 1919. Adi Dravida Sangam, another Hindu reformist organisation, was founded in the 1920s in Singapore. S. C. Goho frequently arranged dialogues there on the Hindu religion. Apart from the religious debates, members of Hindu religious associations occasionally placed their demands before the government. For instance, delegates from the Arya Samaj, Dravida Sangam and Vivekananda Sanmarga Sangam appealed to Singapore's government to introduce an ordinance for the registration of Hindu marriage in the Straits Settlements.

Bengalis migrated to British Malaya through an evolving system regulated from both the sending and receiving ends. The system underwent sporadic changes, revisions and additions, often in response to public criticism or the need for efficiency. However, the flow of emigration and demand for labourers remained largely unaltered. In the early 1920s, a fundamental alteration occurred in migration history with the introduction of passports. This system led to stricter control of mobility, and with the fashioning of a new administration in Malaya and India in the 1940s, migration became even more controlled. The Straits Settlements were dissolved in 1946; Singapore became a separate crown colony, and the Malayan Union was formed with the Unfederated and Federated Malay States. In India, British decolonisation left the subcontinent divided into India and Pakistan, which each devised specific sets of migration rules and regulations. These changes in the sending and receiving regions left marks on migration governance.

Types of Bengali Migrants

Before dealing with the theme in detail, it may be pertinent to note that, based on its characteristics and governing systems, Bengali migration can be divided broadly into bondage or systematic migration and ‘free’ migration. Convicts, indentured and kangany labourers can be placed under the first category. Non-government as well as government agencies transported such labourers through stringent systems. Those being transported like this had no choice or very little legal freedom of movement. The Bengalis who migrated willingly from the early colonial period for better opportunities in commercial ventures and the government sector can be termed ‘free’ migrants. Though they are termed ‘free’, the choices of these labourers were still quite limited at home and overseas. These migrants also had only a little freedom of movement. There was another kind of migrant—those who had to leave India or Bengal due to political persecution. Many Bengali revolutionaries moved to Malaya during the anti-British and nationalist movements in Bengal.

Convicts

From the late eighteenth century, the EIC transported convicts from British India to the Malay Archipelago. Regulation XVII of 1817 categorised the convicts as those accused of robbery, burglary, theft or any other form of open violence, who were liable to be whipped, imprisoned and transported for life.

The two worlds of Bengal and Malaya were connected through language, religion, maritime trade and colonial administration. In addition to being a trade route, the Bay of Bengal carried flows of migrants, information, ideas, cultural practices, pilgrims and soldiers over the centuries. However, this tie between the two worlds became more direct and extensive as British bureaucratic control spread over the Malay Peninsula from Calcutta, creating opportunities in various capacities for the Bengalis. By exploring the cultural contexts of migration, and the routes and nodal points of bonding with the Malay world, this chapter examines the administrative web that cemented existing flows of people, commodities and cultural practices from Bengal.

Linguistic and Cultural Links

The linguistic connection between Bengal and Malaya dates back to the early Christian era. In the Malay Archipelago and mainland Southeast Asia, Austroasiatic languages are widely spoken, which are also used throughout some parts of India, Bangladesh, Nepal and the southern borders of China. Hindu and Buddhist preachers from the Indian subcontinent, including Bengal, spread their beliefs in Southeast Asia in Sanskrit and Pali, leading to Indian linguistic influences in the region. The influence of Bangla, in particular, can be seen through the use of a pre-Nāgarī script. Srivijaya, a Buddhist thalassocratic empire based on the island of Sumatra, also had religious, cultural and trade links with the Buddhist Pala dynasty of Bengal.

The Malay language has borrowed many Sanskrit words. The Bangla script and the Sanskrit language are found in the Sejarah Melayu (Figure 1.1). Lanman suggests that Sanskrit influenced not only the Malay vocabulary but also ideas. About 45 per cent of the total Bangla lexicon is composed of naturally modified Sanskrit words and corrupted forms of Sanskrit. Similarly, there are many Sanskrit loanwords in the Bahasa Melayu. Although Bangla belongs to the Indo-European languages family, while Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian/Austronesian family, many common Sanskrit loanwords can be found in classic Malay and Bangla. Both languages have borrowed a good number of standard Arabic and Persian words (Tables 1.1 and 1.2).

One of the earliest references to Bengal in Malay texts is in Raja Culan's Misa Melayu (The Mass of Malay), dating back to the second half of the eighteenth century. It mentions that a British captain had come from Bengal.

Jibanananda Das, a leading Bengali poet of the twentieth century, never travelled to the Malay Peninsula. However, in an allegorical verse in his famous poem ‘Banalata Sen’, an ode to the eponymous eternal woman, Das expressed that he had travelled for thousands of years from Sri Lanka to the Malay world to attain a moment of peace. His literary mind knew no bounds. Though his journey was a fantasy of love, it gives us a sense of the constant flow of Bengali mobility and culture between the two coasts of the Bay of Bengal and the Malay Sea. Factually, the Bengalis did voyage to the Malay Archipelago over the course of a thousand years. This truth fuelled the imagination of the Bengali poets, as reflected in Das's verse. With the advent of British colonialism, Bengali mobility took a new turn, and Das's verse reflects its nodal points in the eastern Indian Ocean domains during the late colonial period.

The trans-regional mobility of peoples, goods and cultures and its attendant space-making is the central theme of this book. Although studies of connected histories have flourished in the past few decades in the Global South, Bengali historical diasporic experiences have remained largely unexplored. With a focus on the historical mobility of the Bengalis from both Bangladesh and West Bengal of India, the book argues that there was robust Bengali trans-regional mobility in the Malay world, a story that has been largely lost in the narrative of ‘Indian’ migration.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the total number of Bangla-speaking migrants from Bangladesh in the Malay world was approximately 900,000, the vast majority being in Malaysia, followed by Singapore and Brunei Darussalam (hereinafter Brunei).

Like the migrants from many other regions of India, Bengalis cherished high hopes of better lives when they left for British Malaya. As seen in the preceding three chapters, a group of migrants improved the conditions of their lives throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and some became quite successful in their professions. A majority, however, continued to suffer existential challenges under colonial and postcolonial conditions. From their journey to their settlement, the life and times of Bengali expatriates in the Malay world were full of stories of aspiration and struggle. This chapter captures a glimpse of these stories.

Pre-embarkation Difficulties

The embarkation process for migrant labourers was generally dreadful. Their grievances started at the very beginning of their journey. The Government of Bengal erected many depots and sub-depots to collect potential labourers in rural areas. The labourers were taken to a musafir khana (like a modern shelter house) at Calcutta port for overseas embarkation from these depots. One sub-depot at Goalundo (presently Rajbari district in Bangladesh) sent labourers to Calcutta port or the Assam tea gardens. Government medical officers had to prepare annual reports on these depots, which often positively depicted sanitary issues, accommodation and food supplies. However, such positive reports contradict the reality as reflected in other historical sources. For instance, about 615 emigrants were registered in the sub-depots at Garden Reach in Calcutta in May and June of 1918. Although a majority of them were able to reach the Calcutta shelter house, some emigrants were returned on account of their lack of physical fitness, by demand of their relatives, or simply because some of them refused to go any further than the Goalundo depot. Therefore, the pre-embarkation process was anything but easy.

In addition to the contracted or indentured labourers, ‘free’ migrants also embarked from the Calcutta port and experienced a frustrating process. They left their villages and found their way to the Calcutta port by trains or bullock carts. After that, they boarded a ship for a ten- to fifteen-day voyage to Southeast Asian ports. Thousands of them disembarked at Penang or Port Swettenham.