Indenture: The almost forgotten chapter of

South Asian historyPhoto and background courtesy: Please visit this excellent site

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Main questions

• What is indenture?• Why did it evolve? • Why has it been forgotten in

India/South Asia?• How was this history resurrected? • What is the significance of this history? • Is it ‘simply’ history? Why should we

know it?

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What is indenture?

• It is a system of ‘unfree’ labour as opposed to what is called wage labour or ‘free’ labour.

• The latter receive a wage and has no other relation with the employer

• In the former – unfree systems – labourers have both economic and extra-economic relations with the employer

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Main characteristics

• Formalised through a ‘contract’ sometimes called the girmit

• Period of Service: 5 Years from the Date of Arrival in the Colony.

• Nature of labour: plantation work• To work everyday, except Sundays and

authorized holidays.• 9 hours every day during which he is required to

labour without extra remuneration• five consecutive days in every week commencing

with the Monday of each week, and five hours on the Saturday of each week

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Wages ‘plus’

• Wage often in the form of cash advances• Rationed food for the workers and their

children• Accommodation• Schooling• Medical services• Allowed to retain religion and customs, as

opposed to the thorough erasure of identity as under slavery

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Nature of the bondage

It involved:• Debt bondage • the system of wage administration • the enclave nature of the plantation

system• colonial state intervention in the

regulation of labour mobility

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Administration of indenture

Administered by an overseer who received head money

• he was a sole means of credit supply to the labourers – including emergency loans

• a social authority in terms of his caste and kinship relations with those coolies

• Administered wages• Provided employment

(Wickramasinghe and Cameron)

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Why did it evolve?

• The classic form of unfree labour, i.e. slavery abolished in Britain in 1833-4

• That created the need for a supply of cheap, captive labour to the colonies where much profit was to be made in sugar, cotton, tea, rubber etc.

• This need could not be met through wage labour (why?)

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What bondage?

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Conditions in India: Why they left

“The indentured labourers were not all low caste riff raff, but represented a fair cross-section of rural Indian society, including higher, middling and lower castes, and coming from sections of society which, in the late 19th century, were under great stress because ofrecurring natural calamities (droughts and famines) and the crippling effects of British revenue policy which caused crippling indebtedness, fragmented land holdings and scattered families. I showed, too, that while many were deceived into emigrating – fraudulence is present in most forms of labour recruitment, even in our own age – many came from an already uprooted mass of humanity on the move – to the Calcutta jute mills, Assam tea gardens, the Bihar coal mines, Bombay textile mills – in search of employment. I argued that migration to the colonies was an extension of the process of displacement already underway on the subcontinent. I suggested that indentured migration was a complex, multilayered narrative, susceptible to multiple readings, but the whips-and-chains version full of violence and brutality is usually given prominence in popular renditions of indenture”. Professor Brij V Lal

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Agency

“There can be no argument that indenture was a harsh, brutalising experience, which broke many and left others by the wayside. All this is clear from the historical record, but it is by no means the full story. We must accord some measure of humanity and agency to our forebears.. For, from the debris of indenture emerged a community of people, at once resilient and resourceful, determined to build a better future for themselves and their children”. Brij Lal

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Where and how many?

• There are different accounts, but we can get an idea here

• http://girmitunited.org/History.htm

• Take a look at this animated map

• Now.. The real question …

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Coolies: How the British Reinvented Slavery

Watch video here

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What is the significance of studying indenture?

• Perspective on history when seen ‘from below’

• Continuities: (slavery, indenture, bonded labour, sweatshops, trafficking). Forms change, but what remains common?

• Social relations: (relations between the indentured and the freed slaves; relations after indenture; relations between diaspora communities which then shape relations within immigrant societies such as Canada.

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Significance (2)

• Identity: Its importance in shaping social relations

• Orientalism: its relation to colonialism

• Role of ‘local’ forces in administering colonialism

• Understanding of agency