Indian Agent Involvement in the Establishment of Permanent Settlement for the South Indian Labouring Community, 1923–1941

This article investigates a long-neglected aspect of Indian Malaysian history, namely the Indian Agents of the Government of India to British Malaya. The Indian Agents were representatives of the Indian Government who were appointed under the Indian Immigration Act of 1922 to investigate and report on the state of affairs of Indian communities in the British colonies. The official duties of the Indian Agents in British Malaya were formalised under Section 73 (III) of the Labour Code 1923. Between 1923 and 1941, six Indian Agents were appointed in British Malaya. Throughout their tenure, they focused on and reported extensively on the socioeconomic conditions of the Indian working-class community, particularly south Indian labourers. One problem that came to their attention was the underdevelopment of the community’s permanent settlement in the country. The Federated Malay States (FMS) government did not appear to be concerned about the situation. Similarly, private estate managers reacted indifferently to the issue. Both saw permanent settlement as simply an economic measure to keep the community as a labour force, rather than a way to alleviate their socioeconomic hardships. This article shows how the Indian Agents were able to uncover a range of issues that were impeding the establishment of permanent settlements for south Indian labourers in the FMS. Some of them demonstrated exceptional levels of direct involvement. The article’s primary goal is to assess the degree to which the Indian Agents influenced the overall development of permanent Indian labour settlement.

1917

This chapter explores the first sustained efforts to enact a federal ban on peyote in the United States. Missionaries and Indian Agents began pressing for a ban in the late nineteenth century, only to be thwarted by Native American peyotists and their allies in the Bureau of American Ethnology, who argued both that peyote worship should be protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and that it was not deleterious to the health of individual peyotists. By 1917, however, state governments were beginning to pass local bans, with the first prohibitions passed in Colorado and Utah. In early 1918, the U.S. House of Representatives took up the cause, holding hearings on a proposed ban. The record of those hearings offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways that racial anxieties were articulated through anxieties over peyotism in the early twentieth century. The ban passed the House but failed in the Senate.

1937

Histories of peyotism in the United States tend to treat it as deeply rooted and universally embraced in indigenous communities. This chapter reminds us that this was not always the case. During its period of rapid growth, from around 1910 to 1940, peyotism was an evangelical religion in most Native American communities and was met with a great deal of resistance. The peyotists were often young men with ties outside of the community, and their practices challenged traditional hierarchies, traditional practices, and older power-brokers in their communities. In some cases, those who opposed peyotism in Native American communities adopted the same language as the missionaries and the Indian Agents in decrying the spread of peyotism, and in at least one case, (on the Navajo reservation in 1940), this prompted the tribal government to ban peyote on the reservation. The ban passed even with the opposition of the U.S. government, which by 1940 supported the rights of peyotists to practice their religion.

1909

Even as some Americans saw in peyotism a fascinating and perhaps even salubrious Native American religion, others responded with a visceral disgust to what they saw as a degenerate and dangerous cult. This chapter traces the powerful response by missionaries, Indian Agents, and conservatives to the growing popularity of peyotism in Native American communities in the first decades of the twentieth century, beginning with an incident in which the famed temperance activist William “Pussyfoot” Johnson attempted to purchase all the peyote for sale in Laredo and then burn it in a symbolic gesture. The chapter also considers the origins of the peyote religions within Native American communities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Phonetic convergence towards American English by Indian agents in international service encounters

In outsourced voice-based services (call centres are a typical example), an agent providing a service is likely to accommodate their speech to that of the customer. In services outsourced to India, as in other postcolonial settings, the customer accent typically does not have a place in that agent’s repertoire. This presents an opportunity to test whether exposure to the customer accent through telephone work promotes phonetic convergence, and/or whether social factors are implicated in convergence. In this map task experiment, 16 IT workers from Pune (half of whom regularly spoke to American colleagues on the telephone) gave directions to American followers. There was evidence of imitation of the bath vowel with an American addressee. However, imitation did not depend on exposure alone. Attitudes to American English, social networks and individuals’ sense of themselves as performers affected their behaviour in the experiment.