Coolie

From its original denotative sense of a laborer in India or China, coolie has become a highly insulting label for an Indian or Asian person. Its origins are disputed, being either in Koli , the name of a low-caste people of Western India, or in the South Indian Dravidian word quli , “a day laborer,” probably influenced by Tamil kuli , meaning “daily hire.” Although the term was borrowed into English about 1598, British colonists started to use it in various slighting ways, such as “a common fellow of the lowest class” and “a private soldier.”

With the export of Indian labor to plantations in South Africa and the West Indies, the term has come to be widely used disparagingly for an Indian in British English and several varieties. In South Africa it was used in a broad sense of any menial laborer of color. The

Rev. Charles Pettman noted in Africanderisms (1913), the first study of borrowings into South African English, that “as used in Cape Dutch, coolie is applied to Coloured porters and labourers and not to Hindu or Chinese laborers exclusively.” It still carries great opprobrium. Coolie is also recorded in American English from 1854 for a Chinese or East Asian. In 1907, Johnson remarked in Discrimination Against Japanese (56) that “the name ‘coolie’ … is applied to all Orientals.” In contemporary American street-gang use the term refers to an unaffiliated youth.

Coolie is now an offensive mode of address for an Indian in England, as well as in South Africa and Jamaica. Although not used of immigrant Indians in the United States, the term became commonly applied to Chinese laborers, especially during the boom years of railroad construction during the mid-nineteenth century. The word has followed the typical semantic pattern of race terms by acquiring a highly emotive and derogatory meaning through being used by out-group speakers.