"Shipboard Labour and Caste in the Twentieth Century" Topic

"It was the undoubtedly the norm in the twentieth century for shipowners and the imperial state to use racial hierarchies to divide and control the seamen working on board. But if ships were supposed to be microcosms of larger colonial authority structures as Tabili suggests, they equally were also microcosms of the Indian social structures and practices. This would apply especially in terms of caste (a discriminatory system of social stratification used in the Indian subcontinent) because of the sheer intensity of divisions and hierarchies it created within South Asian crews aboard a ship, known collectively as ‘lascars'. Although this is in complete contrast to Ashutosh Kumar's work exploring how ships supposedly became a casteless space for indentured labourers, my research on lascars has driven me to the conclusion that this was not the case at all times. Ships may have been a casteless space for indentured labourers because they were passengers, whereas lascars were workers on the ship…"

link

Armand

Interesting, culture producing discrimination without outside influence.