Purba Hossain (University of York)

“Calcutta in the Eyes of Indentured Migrants, c.1837-1920”

Between 1837 and 1920, more than a million Indian labourers migrated to British plantation colonies in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean. Destined to sugar plantations as contractual workers, many of these indentured Indians passed through the city of Calcutta – the capital of British India and a major port in the subcontinent. This paper investigates how indentured migrants moving through Calcutta experienced, inhabited and remembered the city. In the migrant’s universe, Calcutta was at once the site of work, of separation and of return; a space of opportunity for some, but a space of precarity and loss for others. By exploring memoirs, interviews, diaries and reports from commissions of inquiry, this paper focuses indenture scholarship on Calcutta and foregrounds migrant experience and agency.

Sahith Mandapalli (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

“Freedom, Tradition and Nationalism: Revisiting the Debates on Free Speech in the Indian Constituent Assembly”

This article critically engages with the debates on sedition and free speech in the Indian constituent assembly. Some of the most influential leaders in the Indian national movement were tried and convicted for sedition by British authorities, significant among whom were Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. During his trial, Gandhi famously remarked that section 124A was “prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen”. A number of members in the Assembly too had been subjected to imprisonment under the law. And yet, how did the same law of sedition gain legitimacy in the Constituent Assembly? This paper focuses on restrictions to free speech enacted by the Assembly to make sense of this puzzle. It argues that there were two strands of thinking in the assembly which sought to retain the colonial law of sedition even after independence: one, a liberal-utilitarian line of thinking, which stressed on the need for the nascent state to curb free speech in order to ensure stability and material comfort for its citizens; two, a traditionalist justification of limits to free speech which focused on the importance of maintaining order. This strand of thinking argued that duties are more important than rights. Both the liberal-utilitarian and traditionalist understandings in the assembly allied and came together under the dominant idea of nationalism prevalent in the period.