world and the numerology of five, thirty-three, etc. reflected Indian cosmog-
raphy.^7 In time, forms of dance and shadow-puppet theater made their way
into Southeast Asia as well where to this day one can see renditions of the
Ra ̄ma ̄yan.ain Islamic Indonesia and Buddhist Thailand, modified, to be sure,
to reflect indigenous sensitivities.
The Islam that made its way into Southeast Asia was also heavily influenced
by Indian sources (as well as Persian ones). Muslim merchants from Gujarat,
Bengal, and Tamil Nadu were trading and settling by at least the thirteenth
century in the coastal towns of Indonesia and Malaysia. Su ̄fı ̄s filtered into
these communities by invitation of settled merchants and local rulers. As
sultanates developed, along the Malay Straits, the Mughal court became the
model for kingship and Su ̄fı ̄s often became ministers in the courts by the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The more recent influx of Indians into “Greater India” is a story in itself.
When the British empire ruled in 1835 that slavery would no longer be legal,
plantation owners, British and French, sought cheap labor to replace their
slaves. Within a few years, boatloads of lower-caste and outcaste workers
were recruited, especially from Bengal and Tamil Nadu, but also from Bihar
and the northwest. While the Benga ̄lı ̄ traffic in human cargo slowed, it
increased out of the Tamil ports of Madras and Nagapattinam. Plantation
owners appointed two kinds of assistants – one “assistant,” drawn from the
castes of workers recruited, would attend festivals and villages of Tamil Nadu
(or other areas), recruiting young workers for “three-year” stretches. The
other type of assistant was of a higher class and knew both English and the
vernacular (e.g., Tamil) and could serve as clerks, accountants, and liaison
between the British and the laborers.^8 Into various parts of the British empire
(and to a certain extent the French empire), indentured South Asians were
sent: to Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, East Africa, Sri Lanka, the
Malay Straits, and the French-controlled islands of Mauritius and Reunion.
By the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to unemployment and under-
employment exacerbated by floods and droughts, the number of workers
leaving Tamil Nadu alone was in the tens of thousands a year.^9 Many of these
never returned to India.
On the tea plantations of Sri Lanka and the rubber and the palm plan-
tations of Malaysia (where most of the laborers were Tamil), these workers
were offered limited amenities – known in Malaysia pejoratively as the “three
t’s”. Toddy shops became one of the few forms of entertainment; elementary
schools in the Tamil medium, usually led by under-trained teachers,
succeeded in providing minimal literacy in Tamil, but none in either English
or Malay, thereby inhibiting the mobility and assimilability of the workers.
Finally, temples began to dot the landscape of the plantations, usually in
small plots of land made available to the foreman or clerk (that higher-caste
226 India’s Global Reach