Free Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents by Minal Hajratwala

who had borrowed 300 rupees for the journey, an "aged man" who wept as his landing permit was taken away, and "a boy under his teens":
He was brought on board the ship in the promise of getting down on land by his relative. At the place, being fearful of himself, the relative got down quite heedless of the boy.
    The boy wept aloud, the tears running from his eyes.
    The boy, the barber, the aged man, and thousands of other Indians of that era, seeking to migrate for economic opportunity, were trapped in the gap between the British Empire's rhetoric and its practice. South Africa was not even the world's most extreme case as it wrestled with the common problem of what to do about the "coolies."
    "The whole subject is perhaps the most difficult we have had to deal with," fretted an internal London bureaucratic memo, 1897. "The Colonies wish to exclude the Indians from spreading themselves all over the Empire. If we agree, we are liable to forfeit the loyalty of the Indians. If we do not agree we forfeit the loyalty of the Colonists."
    What had seemed an elegant solution to two problems—relieving population pressure in India and providing cheap labor to the farthest reaches of the growing empire—was now a headache in itself. For the Indians were part of a larger British strategy and could not be as easily maltreated as, say, Aboriginals or native Africans. The Indians had certain rights, a certain degree of clout. Trade with India made up a hefty portion of the British economy, accounting for a fifth of British exports. By 1901, when King Edward VII inherited the throne from his mother, Victoria, four in five of his subjects—300 million—were Indian. They made the empire an empire; they had to be kept, if not happy, at least placid.
    Already in Bombay a self-styled Indian National Congress was calling mass meetings and petitioning for rights; its leaders were making dangerous, fiery speeches. The "Sepoy Rebellion" or Mutiny of 1857, when Indian soldiers rioted and had to be violently suppressed, was within the political memory of the bureaucrats in London. Acts that fostered ill will in India, acts that provided fodder for the nascent independence movement's outrage, were not fiscally sound.
    Because of this, London could not allow the colonies to adopt blatant racial discrimination. Subtle discrimination was, however, a different matter. To satisfy imperial politics, the legislators of Natal were forced into creativity. They could not, for example, limit
Indian
immigration; British subjects possessed the right to travel freely, and this right could not be taken away—at least, not on overtly racial grounds. So Natal imposed a "literacy" test. The immigration officer could require any prospective immigrant to answer, in writing,
in a European language,
certain questions. If the would-be immigrant was white but illiterate, the officer waived the test. But if he was swarthy, or otherwise undesirable, the test was given; and even if he was educated to the highest degree in his native language, he would not pass if he could not write his answers in a European tongue.
    This creativity did not go unnoticed. In a 1900 speech to the heads of the colonies, their boss, Joseph Chamberlain, praised Natal for its "entirely satisfactory" solution. Soon Australia, which was having a problem with the Chinese (it wanted railroad labor, and received aspiring human beings), refined the solution further. It barred anyone who, "when an officer dictates to him not less than fifty words in any prescribed language, fails to write them out in that language in the presence of the officer."
    Any
prescribed language. Asian immigrants were asked at the docks to take dictation in Dutch, in German, in Portuguese, by officers who laughed at their confusion. Similar nondiscriminatory discriminations spread to New Zealand, Canada, other parts of Africa. The United States considered a literacy test in 1917, but—unbound by British civility and economic