Human vs Chattel
-
Though most Asians were "free men and woman" according to Visram, their treatment was more similar to that of animals than anything else (15). He describes them as chattel; that is, an item of property for the British people who would bring back boys and girls from India. They were distinguished from slaves in the sense that they were not necessarily used for their labour - Visram provides the example of an attorney named William Hickey who brought with him a "little pet boy" from Calcutta since he was an "interesting looking handsome boy" (12-13). Even though Hickey did not use the boy as a servant, he kept him around as a sort of status symbol. The popular idea of the Orient as exotic and mystical meant that it was fashionable for British families to keep Indian servants and dress them up in "Oriental costumes" (Visram 13).
What I found especially interesting was the interchangeable physical descriptors used for both African and Asian servants - many of the descriptions of Asian slaves in the newspapers called them "black," which made me think of the conversations we have been having in class about the fluidity of racial identity and blackness. We have seen many examples of minority communities referring to themselves as black, such as the Latinx case studies we discussed in our last class; but in all of these examples, it was the oppressed peoples' way of describing themselves. In this case, the Asian servants are being ascribed the description "black" by the British people in power. It serves as a way for the British colonisers to club together all of the racialised servant class and effectively Other them as one group.