This article examines the making of the Indian diaspora in colonial Malaya between 1870 and 1941, challenging interpretations that reduce Indian migration primarily to plantation labour. Using a historical-comparative approach, it draws on colonial administrative records, censuses, labour and immigration reports, official investigations, contemporary newspapers, and scholarship to trace diverse occupational migration streams. It analyses plantation labour alongside commerce and moneylending, policing, railways, clerical and professional employment, highlighting how occupation intersected with class, region, language, religion and caste. The article argues that occupational differentiation structured unequal access to capital, education, institutions, social status and mobility, while plantation communities remained sites of labour control, settlement and social reproduction. At the same time, religious institutions, schools, newspapers, voluntary associations, labour organisations and transnational networks connected otherwise differentiated groups. The study therefore conceptualises diaspora formation as a simultaneous process of differentiation and integration, through which a broader, constructed Indian identity emerged in colonial Malaya.
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Satyam Singh ; Dr. Sudhanshu Chaubey
282-302
10.5281/zenodo.23227298
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