Lascarnama
Amitav Ghosh, author of the recently published Sea of Poppies, tells Jabberwock about lascars, the sailors who were the forerunners of today’s globalized work-force:
[L]ascars – they were absolute pioneers, in that they were the first Asians to work in a western industrial process. The sailing ship was an extremely complex machine, technically speaking, much more so than the fairly simple ships that we had in India. And nautical engineering was really the cutting-edge technology of the 19th century; it was like aerospace today. The lascars were the first Asians to work in a cutting-edge modern technology, the first to acquire a colloquial familiarity with European languages, the first to work with the European rhythms of time (the western-style ship was run on four-hour watches), and they were also the first Asians to set up settlements in London – Shoreditch, for example.
So in every sense, the lascars were the equivalent of today’s IT workers.
Go here for an account of the book launch in Mumbai
