EMIGRATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE: A Sociological Study of the Early Emigrants of Andamans

The book analyses the socio-economic and cultural patterns of the ‘locals’ of the Andaman Islands who have a certain amount of ethnic consciousness and cultural identity among themselves. The locals are the creation of the British policy of colonisation of the Andaman Islands. While comparing the characteristics of the people who were imprisoned in the Andaman Islands with those Indians, who migrated to other British colonies as indentured labour, a qualitative difference is noticed. The indentured labour recruited in groups from some specific cultural area of India, carrying with them a part of their cultural and linguistic milieu, and thus they were able to develop a miniature cultural India in those British colonies. Insofar as the early migrants of Andaman Islands are concerned, they were drawn from different parts of India and not significantly in good number from any specific linguistic region and, therefore, they were unable to recreate any specific linguistic cultural form in the Andaman Islands. People of different languages, religions, castes and classes had to amalgamate themselves to create a new community, which, on the one hand, must have retained features of Indian social life, while at the same time they do not represent any specific culture area. What was the process of the formation of a new community? What is specific social form of the community? How does it resemble the parent culture from India? To what extent it differs from the culture of the mainland, especially in matters of caste and joint family-based society? What factors of unity do they show and how do they react to the other migrant inhabitants of that place? These are some of the issues, which have found place in the present book.