Chapter 6 explores how the contracting of Ranchi labourers from Chotanagpur as successors to colonial convicts in the task of forest clearance and infrastructure development has conditioned their marginalized position in the Andaman society. Since the advent of their migration in 1918, racial stereotypes attached to their ‘aboriginality’ accompanied the Ranchis to the islands. Having been continuously exploited and discriminated against as ‘tribals’ by decision-makers and members of the Andaman society, the Ranchis remained, as a result, alienated from the lines of social mobility. A historical analysis of the Ranchis’ disenfranchisement in the first section of the chapter is followed by the presentation of three exemplary life histories of subaltern migrants in the second section. Here, the author underlines the argument that migration cannot be understood as a one-dimensional process of exploitation, but that the voices and perspectives of subalterns as silenced agents of history must be considered.
