Shipboard Labour and Caste in the Twentieth Century

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. 

For the colonial state, racial and caste hierarchies among the workforce was used to keep all the different groups in check. For the indentured labourer-passengers, they had greater anxieties than thinking about caste hierarchies on a voyage to an unknown land where a collective sense of agency was already forced upon them the moment they chose to become indentured labourers. The state wanted to mitigate their anxieties and introduce castelessness because they wanted an efficient workforce when they arrived on land where they were expected to stay and work. In contrast, a lascar was expected by the state to go back home within the Indian society when they were discharged on an Indian port at the end of their contract, so the state did not care about lascars losing or sticking to their castes.

In fact, as opposed to European seamen, one of the unique things about lascars was how the ranks for them were often based on their caste rather than on merit or experience even though those ranks were equivalent to some or the other rank for European seamen. This can be seen most clearly with the lascar rank of ‘topass’, equivalent to a British ‘apprentice’, but who in practice was from the very bottom of the Indian caste hierarchy, and only had the role of a sweeper who ‘did the dirtiest work which the caste man may not touch’. However, they were not the only lower caste ‘untouchables’ working aboard (described as a ‘harijan’) there was also the ‘kussab’ or ‘battiwallah’ who was the lamp-trimmer on board, and he would be discriminated against by the other lascars despite the fact that he would have earned slightly more than the ordinary lascar. Other ranks of lascars like the ‘mistree’ (carpenter) or the ‘bhandary’ (storekeeper) might have also had men from specific castes involved in similar professions in India, although higher in caste hierarchy than a topass or a battiwallah.

Of course, having the dynamics of caste play out in the constrained environment of a ship in the middle of an ocean led to certain difficulties, especially when it came to food, as recorded in a P&O document: ‘If, as in some companies, the deck crew are Hindus, li[f]e can become complicated by the rules of caste. They are often very fussy, especially about food, for religious reasons. One of the best known of their unusual ideas is that if the shadow of a person, who is not a Hindu of their caste, crosses their food, it is defiled and has to be thrown over the side’.

In fact, conflicts within lascar crews over the issue of caste were not unheard of. While incidents taking place over the high seas would be difficult to trace, one notable example of such conflicts occurred in 1926, when a fight broke out between a number of lascar firemen and ordinary seamen from the crew of City of Sparta while it was docked in Glasgow. One of the lascars from the crew had apparently lost his caste as he was no longer a teetotaller, and he was believed to have ‘contaminated’ the food of other lascars by ‘kicking it’ (accidentally or otherwise). The situation became very tense after that, with six of the enraged lascars attacking the others including the lascar who had supposedly lost his caste. The conflict turned incredibly serious, with knives, wooden batons, and iron bars being used in the ensuing fight. The noise created from the fight was loud enough to bring the police to the scene, and six lascars ended up injured while six others were arrested. Significantly, incidents like these create an opportunity for us to examine caste as an entrenched social crisis to explore the power dynamics within Indian society—in this case in a context located geographically outside of India. 

It is unsurprising then that joining the workforce as a lascar also provided an opportunity to lose one’s caste—a prospect which had positive implications as well at times, unlike what the City of Sparta incident shows. Aligning with Ayyathurai’s recent work in the new subfield of sociology/history, critical caste studies, focuses on unravelling the counter-caste practices of subjugated Indians and their movements. The most prominent example of an ‘emigration against caste’ here would be the case of the Battiwallah Society that existed during the interwar period. While a ‘battiwallah’ was originally meant to be a lower caste ‘untouchable’, over time as due to modernisation lamps were replaced with powerful searchlights in need of being operated by educated engineers, eventually the term ‘battiwallah’ itself came to stand for electrical engineers across the merchant and Royal Navy ships whose work other lascars came to regard as the ‘work of magicians’. Organising themselves formally into a society through their informal routine of taking lunch together in London, the Battiwallah Society thus represented a case wherein caste connotations related to a rank aboard a ship were denounced through education and the need for greater skills.

Hence, while lascars are important for us to understand caste dynamics in a shipboard environment, they are equally also important to those who could join the workforce to emigrate against their caste. As such, becoming a lascar brought with it the potential for expressing a subaltern subject’s socio-political agency by emigrating against a colonialist casteist continuum that freed them from oppressive societal structures and came with immense implications for the rest of the society they came in contact with. Contrary to societal norms, the loss of one’s caste in these cases would become a moment of political liberation rather than exile, and this is a crucial way in which lascars could renegotiate their “lascarness” that gave rise to the formation of political networks during the interwar period.

These political networks formed in the interwar years, and as Raza and Zachariah have demonstrated, came to constitute the ‘lascar system’ comprising of the movement of men, printed matter, and arms across the world that made lascars the ‘key players in the politics of the interwar world, and especially in a still-colonised India’. This can be seen in the spread of communism across the globe through the creation of International Seamen’s Club, or ‘Interclubs’, in places like Hamburg. The expression of a ‘subaltern internationalism’ – the idea of a transnational brotherhood of the working classes – was at the core of such political movements. This was true for even non-communist ideologies like that of Gandhian Satyagraha, as in 1930 while Gandhi had launched the Civil Disobedience movement in India, a disgruntled serang in Glasgow is seen accusing a few of the lascars under him of being affected by ‘the Gandhi feeling’. Much to the chagrin of the imperial state, deeply concerned with restricting the movement of people across national borders and paranoid about political radicalism, the mobility of lascars had become an asset to political movements of all kinds.