Everything about Coolies totally explained
Coolie
(variously spelled
Cooly, Kuli, Quli, Koelie etc.)
is:
Etymology
In 1727 Dr.
Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock laborers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at
Nagasaki. The word
coolie can be traced back to the
Hindi word
qūlī (क़ूली), which means "(day-)labourer", and perhaps ultimately to
Kulī, an aboriginal tribe in
Gujarat or to the
Tamil word
kuli கூலி ("wages") (Encyclopædia Britannica). Another form closely related to the Hindi
qūlī is the
Bengali kuli.
The Chinese word (
Pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength." The most commonly used cultural Chinese term is (Pinyin: gu1 li2).
Connotation
When it first entered the
English language, "coolie" was a
designative term describing a low-status class of workers rather than a
pejorative term for them. However, in the wake of centuries of
colonialism and the
social inequalities thereof, it has taken on not only the characteristics of a
slur in the general sense but also that of a
racial epithet. In this last sense, it has been applied to
Asian people regardless of their professions or socio-economic standing with obviously insulting intent.
For example, by the 1850s in
Trinidad, the annual
Muharram or
Hosay festival that came over from India was being called "the Coolie Carnival." Through the
Caribbean, as well as in
Sri Lanka,
South Africa, and elsewhere, the word soon came to denote any person of Indian origin or descent.
By the mid to late 19 century in the United States, the term "coolie" and other trappings of the "coolie stereotype" were already being used to mock (for example) Chinese-American launderers or restaurateurs who owned their own businesses.
History
The term
coolie was applied to workers from Asia, especially those who were sent abroad to most of the
Americas, to
Oceania and the
Pacific Islands, and to
Africa (especially
South Africa and islands like
Mauritius and
Réunion). It was also applied within Asian areas under European control such as
Sri Lanka,
Malaysia,
Shanghai and
Hong Kong.
Slavery had been widespread in the British empire, but social and political pressure led to its being outlawed by the
Slave Trade Act 1807; within a few decades, many other European nations had outlawed slavery. But the highly intensive
colonial labour on
sugar cane or
cotton plantations, in
mines or
railways, required cheap
manpower.
Experiments were carried with
Malagasy,
Japanese,
Breton or
Congolese laborers. Ultimately the "ideal coolies" were the
Indians, shipped to many
Indian Ocean islands, East and
South Africa,
Fiji,
Guyana,
Martinique,
Trinidad,
Jamaica, to name only some of the lands where
taylorization was applied as a means of increasing
productivity worldwide.
Chinese coolies were also sent to the New World. They worked in
guano pits in
Peru, in sugar cane fields in
Cuba and built the railways in the United States and British Columbia.
Hugh Tinker called the coolie trade "a new form of slavery".
Recruitment and trade
After slavery was abolished, there was a severe lack of labour in many European colonies. Although labourers were supposed to be recruited by voluntary negotiation, it's evident that trickery and deceit were common and outright kidnapping occurred as well.
Most Indian indentured labour was recruited for the British colonies through "Colonial Agents" who travelled to India. In India, they engaged the services of
arkatias or recruiters who knew the places to find likely enlistees. A male/female ratio of 10:4 was sought, but women proved difficult to recruit for overseas and allegations of deception and kidnapping seem plausible. "Emigration Depots" were set up in
Kolkata,
Madras and
Mumbai although the latter was closed rather quickly when abuses were made public in India.
Many voluntary émigrées came from among the very
poor people of Madras,
Bengal,
Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, and
Bihar. Once established, this system gained momentum as British policies destroyed domestic or
cottage industry, crafts and family farms through
taxation and the
zamindar system. Famines continued to flow out of India for decades.
Around 1845, after the end of the first
Opium War (1840-1842), a center for
emigration at
Shantou organised a network for transporting Chinese from
Guangdong,
Amoy, and
Macau to
the Americas, especially to the
silver mines in
Peru and the
sugar plantations of
Cuba and other
West Indian islands. Most of them would have been kidnapped from
Guangdong province.
Indentured labourers from
Indochina were recruited primarily by
France and sent to other
French colonies.
The coolie trade was criticised for unfairness to workers, and for being
de facto slavery. Labourers would be transported aboard packed vessels to be sent to their destinations, and many would die on the way there due to malnutrition, disease, or other mistreatment. Mutinies were also known to occur during transportation
Although Chinese labor contributed to the building of the
Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the
Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction.
California's
Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the oppression of Chinese laborers in the United States.
Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labor from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers played an indispensable role in the construction of a vast network of
levees in the
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees opened up thousands of acres of fertile
marshlands for agricultural production.
According to the
Constitution of the State of California (1879):
The presence of foreigners ineligible to become citizens of the United States is declared to be dangerous to the well-being of the State, and the Legislature shall discourage their immigration by all the means within its power. Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labor shall be void. All companies or corporations, whether formed in this country or any foreign country, for the importation of such labor, shall be subject to such penalties as the Legislature may prescribe.
Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the
sugarcane fields of
Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Many scholars debate whether the Chinese coolies of Cuba should be called "slaves," the authoritative scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated the horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and unreservedly stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Before the
Cuban Revolution in 1959,
Havana had
Latin America's largest
Chinatown.
In
South America, Chinese indentured laborers worked in
Peru’s silver mines and coastal industries (for example,
guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as
indentured workers. They infamously participated in the
War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the
haciendas where they worked, subsequent to the fall of
Lima to the invading Chilean army in January 1880.
Between 1836 and 1917, at least "238,000 Indians were introduced into
British Guiana, 145,000 into Trinidad, 21,500 into
Jamaica, 39,000 into
Guadeloupe, 34,000 into
Surinam, 1,550 into
St. Lucia, 1,820 into
St. Vincent, 2,570 into
Grenada. In 1859, there were 6,748 Indians in
Martinique." Although these were incomplete statistics, Eric Williams (see references) believed they were "sufficient to show a total introduction of nearly half a million Indians into the Caribbean" (Williams 100).
Champions of the coolies
While Black slavery was abolished in 1848, coolies in Guadeloupe, the French West Indies, were brought from 1854 to 1889, but they were not to be recognised as French citizens until 1923, as a result of the 9-year court struggle of self-made
Henri Sidambarom with the French Government.
Another man was to champion the cause of the coolies in Mauritius :
Adolph von Plevitz, who denounced the inhuman treatments inflicted on those poorly educated labourers.
Gandhi also fought for them, and the coolie trade was abolished in the 1920s.
Recently, poet and semiologist
Khal Torabully has evolved a humanistic framework springing from coolitude.
In Media
Film
In
Stephen Chow’s 2004 action-comedy
Kung Fu Hustle, former Shaolin monk
Xing Yu plays a character named
Coolie, who does hard labor in a multi-floored apartment-block village called “Pig Sty Alley”. However, when a petty thief (Stephen Chow) and his side-kick pose as members of the infamous “Axe Gang” and accidentally bring upon the wrath of actual members, Coolie is the first of three retired martial artists who come to the village’s aid. He is a master of the
12 Kicks of the Tam School (十二路潭腿), a leg-oriented boxing style. He is later beheaded by assassins hired by the Axe Gang to kill the village’s landlords.
Coolie is a 1983 Indian film about a coolie Amitabh Bachchan who works on a railway station. His lover's father is man who murdered a girl's father to force her to marry him, but she didn't give in. After 10 years of imprisonment, he flooded her village (injuring her new husband) and causing her wake up with amnesia. It starred
Amitabh Bachchan and
Waheeda Rehman.
Guiana 1838 is a 2004 docu-drama that explores the unknown world of indentureship and slavery in the British Colonies of the West Indies. It reveals the trials and tribulation of both the resilent African slaves and the unsuspecting Indians from Calcutta who were sold on the golden dreams of "El Dorado" only to find themselves on a slave ship to hard labor in an unforgiving land.
(External Link
)
Television
In
Donnie Yen’s 1994 martial arts
mini-series "Hung Hei-Gun: Decisive Battle With Praying Mantis Fists" (洪熙官: 决战螳螂拳, a.k.a. "The Kung Fu Master"), a flood causes a large section of a heavily traveled bridge to collapse. A supernaturally strong coolie named Tung Chin-gun builds a make shift section and charges people to cross it while he holds it above his head. At one point, he supports the combined weight of a merchant’s retinue and live stock.
He later sets up a sign that reads “power for sale” and charges people to lift them to the top floor of a famous restaurant on a chair strapped to a long bamboo ladder. A
rackish Manchu prince has two of his men ride the chair to the top, but as it nears the edge, they dig their feet into the ledge and push back with their legs, making it harder for Tung. Then the prince punches a heavy food cart at the coolie. He stops the cart with one hand and then pushes on the ladder with the other, over powering the two men and sending them and the ladder flying into the restaurant.
When the prince challenges a fellow
suitor to fight Tung over the right to marry a girl, legendary martial arts hero
Hung Hei-Gun (Donnie Yen) opts to fight in the suitor's stead. (Hung later visits Tung at home and discovers he's competing in the fight in order to save up enough money to support his elderly blind mother). The battle takes place on a three-sided
lei tai draped with a red cloth that reads "The Supreme Master in the world of martial arts". Despite the coolie's inhuman abilities, he lacks the Kung Fu training of which Hung is a master. Hung aims for a vital spot under Tung's arm and then unleashes a series of kicks that sends him flying from the fighting stage.
The coolie later befriends Hung and they escape to the
Shaolin Monastery to hide from
Qing Dynasty forces and to learn
Shaolin Kung Fu.
Literature
Literature and
culture reflected the dereliction of the
indentured, who created
baitkas or village centres to learn or uphold their tales, religions, sacred texts and start a nucleus of political awareness. Yet the 1930s
négritude movement, focussing on the plight of the Blacks, failed to chart the cultural suffering of the coolies. Martinican poet
Aimé Césaire, for instance, spoke of the "Hindu man from Calcutta" in his
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, reflecting the perception he'd of the coolie, as still exterior to the West Indian community.
Gilbert Gratiant was among the first writers of this region to give some presence to this citizen in limbo. A new awareness was expressed by
Marcel Cabon,
Loys Masson and
Malcolm de Chazal in
Mauritius.
Most recently,
poet Khal Torabully's
Cale d'étoiles-Coolitude (Azalées éditions, 1992) introduces the
neologism, "coolitude." Torabully defines coolitude as a
postcolonial and
postmodern aesthetics, anchored in
otherness, that goes beyond the specific condition of Asian migrant labor.
Modern use
In Indonesian, kuli is now a term to describe especially the construction workers.
In Thai, kuli (กุลี) still retains its original meaning as manual labourers.
The word qūlī is now commonly used in Hindi to refer to luggage porters at hotel lobbies and railway and bus stations. Nevertheless, the use of such (especially by foreigners) may still be regarded as a slur by some.
In Ethiopia, Cooli is a term that refers to those who carry heavy loads for someone. The word isn't used as a slur however. The term used to describe Arab day-laborers who migrated to Ethiopia for labor work.
In the Persian language, a similar term, which is, means "gypsy."
The Dutch word koelie, refers to a worker who performs very hard, exacting labour. The word generally has no particular ethnic connotations among the Dutch, but is used as a slur amongst Surinamese to designate Hindoestanen .
In 2002, Abercrombie & Fitch pulled a line of tee shirts from stores across the United States after complaints that they depicted racist caricatures of Asian Americans. A typical criticism of the said "These are the kind of images we saw in California newspapers a century ago" and "It smacks of Charlie Chan and the coolie stereotype".
In Trinidad and Tobago the word is used as a slur by the entire population including those of Indian ancestry but is sometimes said self-referentially by some of the Indo-Caribbean population. In 2006, for example, Senator Surendranath Capildeo proudly admitted to being a "coolie to the bone".
Its used as short for a slang Spanish and Italian term, "culo", spelled "coolie" referring to the buttocks.
In America, among the car/truck enthusiast subculture, it's a term used to identify the extra installation of vehicle marker lights (usually colored) in the grill, along and under the body, and under the rear of the vehicle. Coolies are the "cool lights" installed just for fun, individuality, or identification purposes.Further Information
Get more info on 'Coolies'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://coolie.totallyexplained.com">Coolie Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
