Colonial Migration in Global South and Some Challenges in Archival Records

Undoubtedly, colonial migration in the Global South is one of the avenues in modern world history. With the establishment of European imperialism and colonialism, transregional connectivity and human mobility took a new turn across the world. Likewise, in other regions of the world, diverse South Asian ethnic groups migrated to British Malaya and were categorized as “Indians” in archival records. Such an umbrella term was also used to denote heterogeneous migrating communities in other colonies in the Global South. However, such categorization and archival documents made it difficult to reconstruct the history of a specific migrating community from South Asia during postcolonial times. This chapter examines some challenges in colonial records and techniques to overcome them, as well as reconstructs the diverse ethnic migrations through the lens of the Bengali experiences. This study thus focuses on two interrelated issues: First, it shows how the homogenizing identity of South Asian migrants influenced postcolonial scholarship. Second, it briefly notes some nonconventional techniques used to recover the history of Bengali mobility among other South Asians. It concludes by suggesting that academics and historians on human mobility must be aware of stringent categorizing systems in archival records. They may consider alternate ways or indirect evidence for reconstructing the migration history of a specific community in modern world history.