EMIGRANT COOLIE, edited and prepared for publication by Hemant Nowbath and Pravin Ram

408pp., illus., maps, paperback, Micromega, Durban, 2026

ISBN: 9781037095160

This history of Indian indentured labour and the Indian diaspora it spawned, published posthumously, was completed by Ranji Howbath in 1959 during the course of a cultural scholarship to India in 1949-1952. It focuses on those who migrated from India to Natal, Mauritius, Reunion, the West Indies, Fiji and British East Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Indian South Africans were traditionally categorised under the colonial nomenclature of "Coolies" and "Arabs". The term "Coolie" referred specifically to indentured labourers imported from the Indian subcontinent to work on Natal's sugar plantations. The term "Arabs" denoted those Indian traders, predominantly Muslim, who migrated subsequently as "passenger Indians", financing their own passage and arriving without contractual labour obligations. Within two decades, this heterogeneous community came to be perceived collectively as a singular societal "problem", elevated to a major political concern after the first governmental inquiry into the "Indian question" in the 1880s. This political framing has overshadowed scholarly engagement with the community as a distinct socio-cultural entity possessing a distinct culture.

"Ranji Nowbath is a brilliant chronicler of the life of Indian South Africans as they negotiated the years of indenture and the first half of a tumultuous twentieth century. He could write short, incisive political commentaries and longer, meticulously researched articles. Freed from the straightjacket of political correctness and narrow party-political allegiance, he wrote with freedom and dignity. This sense of history, the gaze that is at once global and local, the ability to weave complex historical forces into a beguiling narrative is on full display in Emigrant Coolie." Professor Ashwin Desai, University of Johannesburg

The late Durban scholar, journalist, and lawyer Ranji Seetharam Nowbath was born in Newcastle in 1921. He worked at The Leader newspaper from 1941 to 1945, selling advertising space, reporting, and editing alongside founder Dhanee Bramdaw. Later, after returning from India, he taught at schools, edited The Graphic, studied law part-time, and was admitted to the Bar in 1971.

Hemant Nowbath, Ranji S. Nowbath's son, is a psychiatrist in private practice in Durban.

Pravin Ram is a retired history curriculum specialist from the KZN Department of Education.