mishra -indentured indian labor

Draft Paper on work in progress. Please do not cite.

Indentured Indian Labour Regimes: Situating

Peripheral Labour in Global Historical Context

Draft Paper

Seminar on Global History

Weatherhead Initiative on Global History, Harvard University

23 February 2015

Dr Amit Kumar MISHRA

Postdoctoral Fellow, WIGH, Harvard University

[email protected]

Assistant Professor

Centre for Study of Indian Diaspora

University of Hyderabad

Hyderabad (India)

[email protected]

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 1

Before I start, I would like to place certain caveats about imprecision in formulations

and substantive methodological challenges in this work:

1. Peripheral Labour : I put it in a generic sense primarily to underline certain

dissimilarities with the industrial labour in factories in industrialized capitalist

metropolis (core) and to suggest the inadequacy of analytic framework offered

by the ahistoric universalization of capital-‐labour relationships and ‘wage

labour’. This entails the labour sourced and employed in the territories

politically ‘subrdinate’ to the imperial core in non-‐industrial sectors like

plantation. For more sophisticated discourse analysis of ‘peripheral labour’

please see Amin, Shahid and Marcell van der Linden eds. Peripheral Labour:

Studies in the History of Partial Proleterianisation (1997)

2. Trap of Centrism: To situate indentured labour regime within the context of

global history I have to talk about the capitalist concerns of the imperial

metropolis. In historical processes like indentured labour regime in which

temporalities in core (Europe, Britain) determine the periodization of the rest of

the world how would one survive the trap of ‘cetrism’ and spatial-‐historical

determinism of the West. My trepidation is best articulated by Jim Blaut

‘Eurocentrism is a complex thing. We can banish all the value meanings of the

word, all the prejudices, and we still have Eurocentrism as a set of empirical

belief.’ (James M Blaut: The Coloniser’s Model of the World, 1993:9)

I have tried to find some logic by looking into the detrimental impact of

colonization: Peripheral history cannot be written without constantly referring

to the metropolitan history. I would also like to address this with the reason of

‘mentality’ and also by decrypting the ‘intent’ because intention is extremely

deep-‐rooted in the fashioning of historical processes as well as historiography of

such processes.

3. Old History vs Global History: Study of indentured labour regime entails


studying institutions and political structures. These shaped the contours of the

indenture system and its dynamics but also make it a case of largely structuralist

analysis of ‘old history’ than global history.

I have tried to balance this by looking into two intersecting vectors – history of

labour regime and history of labourers, in a dynamic, analytic mould with an

attempt to trace the synergy between these two as well their synergies with the

larger global context.


‘Each historical event is unique. But many events, widely separated in time

and space, reveal, when brought into relation with each other, regularities of

process.’1

Premise of Global History

We all are familiar with the basic premise of global history and debating its

essentials through several reading and presentation sessions in this course. However, I

would like to begin with reiterating some of the basics in order to set the theoretical-

analytic grid of my work.

In recent years, owing primarily to the overarching forces of globalisation

which have led to an unprecedented increase in economic, political, social and

cultural interaction and integration among disparate regions of the world, there have

been attempts by historians across the world to outdo the territorial restrictions of

their understanding of past and to bring in a discourse analysis of networks and

connections which transcends the territorial boundaries of nation-states. This global

turn in historical writing or narratives of global history essentially aim to investigate

the historical roots of global conditions and connections that have led to multirole

negotiations and renegotiations of global integration and modern globalisation in

order to contribute towards a better understanding (and a possible resolution) of

certain complexities and limitations of hitherto prevailing state of history writing. One

such limitation is implication of territorial political boundaries as epistemological

boundaries, know as centrism – e.g. Eurocentrism. Global history attempts to tackle

this inadequacy by enunciating the concept ‘spatial turn’. The spatial turn 2 -

conceptual departure from essentialised Eurocentrism and recognition of historical

significance and involvement of non-western regions and people in making of the

modern world, and repudiation of the methodological hegemony of any ‘centrism’ has

been proposed as the fundamental methodological stance for writing global history.

The very recognition of the fact that trans-regional flows, exchanges and transitions

1 E P Thompson The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, London, 1978 p.84 2 Warf, Barney and Santa Arias, eds., The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London: Routledge,2008.


cannot be explicated through a singular, fixed spatial framework3 (like Eurocentrism

or Atlantic-centric) as it fails to capture the dialectics of transborder networks and

flows (such as migration) has established, in no uncertain terms, that no mono-spatial

approach like Eurocentrism can be posited as the determinant and dominant discourse

for the historical processes and progression of entire world or serve as the

historiographical norm for writing global history.

Global history is neither an attempt to write a metanarrative of everything and

every part of the globe nor, as Marcel van Linden suggests in context of global labour

history, a bid to provide an alternative to the earlier attempts like the world system. 4

The essential point of departure in the present schema of global history is the attempt

to overcome narrow national/regional readings of historical events and processes by

shifting the analytic focus to historical processes of global integration, inclusion and

connectedness through networked flows of capital, commodities and ideas. Global

history, in this premise, offers historical explanation for the intensification of global

integration ‘which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are

shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’. 5

This history goes beyond comparative history by not just drawing parallels,

though comparative assessment does remain and should remain a crucial vantage

point.

Global history, in its attempt to narrate the entangled stories from across the

world, is confronted with the challenges to disentangle the conceptual and

methodological complexities, rethinking through established normative categories of

analysis and the risks of hegemonic dominance of one ‘centrism’ while arguing

against the other. Fashioning an appropriate language, analytical concepts and

methodological approaches that can capture and square the dialectics of divergent

perspectives is the foremost challenge for the agenda of global history.

This work perceives the history of indentured Indian labour regime not as

isolated, indifferent, history but part of an intertwined, inseparable history of 19th and 3 Arjun Appadurai, Sovereignty; Saskia Sassen, ‘Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorisation’, Public Culture, 12,1, 2000, pp.215-‐32 4 van der Linden, Marcel, ‘The Promise and Challenges of Global Labour History’ International Labour and Working-‐Class History, 82, Fall 2012, p.60 5 Giddens, Anthony, The Consequence of Modernity, 1990


early 20th C global capitalism and British empire. By delineating the history of

indentured Indian labour regimes, this work attempts to participate in the debates

around two fundamental subsets of writing global history – labour history and

migration history, both of which intend to move beyond the structural normative of

doing global history by bring the ‘human’ into the purview. My attempt is to rehearse

some of the basics of global history with the conceptual slant of social history –

incorporation of ‘non-capitalist’ in capitalist economies. (By studying the imperial

universalism and liberal, reformist ethos as the definitive of British imperial ideology

I also intend to make a foray into global intellectual history. But this is rather

ambitious and asking for too much at the moment) Most of the studies, including my

own study of indentured labourers in Mauritius, have been location specific and

structure oriented and therefore fail to appreciate the complexities of this

extraordinary dissemination of ideas, institutions and people. I have tried to reread

and reify the essentialized categories of analysis by looking for potentialities of

transformation and agency within the regime. Specifying the Indian case is not only

to underline the Indian exceptionalism but also to take up the challenge of global

history (of labour and migration specifically) beyond the divergence debate and

Europe-China parallelism.

At the level of larger discourse analysis, it is an attempt to study the

intellectual fundamentals of the British empire, imperialism and the intimate and

constitutive relationship between the evolution of universal liberalism as a modern

political thought and European imperial expansion. A critical exploration of the

promulgation of protocols to regulate indentured labour regime will help us

comprehend the ways in which ideals of modern western political thought were

pronounced for political-moral justification of conquest and colonization and attempts

towards exonerating the colonial supremacies from the remorse of racialised

imperium.

Need for the New Labour

19th century marked a unique blending of commercial interests and political

power which got manifested in the setting up of empire(s) and creating colonies


across Africa and Asia, primarily by the industrializing European powers—the Dutch,

French and British. This century also witnessed gigantic human displacements,

primarily of the labouring class across regions, nations and continents ensuing its

recognition as century of ‘men moving’. 6 Both these essential markers of the

nineteenth century—large-scale migration and imperialist expansion did not ensue by

themselves, but had a symbiotic relationship, each one facilitating the advancement of

the other. Subsequently, a new era of ‘capitalist world-economy’ began in which

‘industrialization and the introduction of large- scale cash cropping in agriculture

went apace’ and to smooth the progress of this new order, ‘political economies were

refashioned, social ties rent and rearranged, and people moved from areas of supply to

areas of demand.’7 These newly acquired settlements were prepared and promoted by

the imperial powers essentially to facilitate the further growth of the metropolis by

producing raw materials for industrial or human consumption and to ensure this

supply, political control in form of colonialism was considered to be a necessity. In

this larger schema of capitalist world economy, plantation settlements served as the

regional economies for the global capitalist economy of the empire and success of

plantation economy was dependent upon critical balance between abundant land and

cheap labour which was ensured through territorial expansion in unexplored areas like

Fiji, Natal (for land) and areas of abundant population like India (for labour).

The expansion of the capitalist world economy under the aegis of imperialism

necessitated a colossal demand for labour, especially for labour intensive plantation

work, which could not be fulfilled by the locally available labour force in the regions

of expansion. The problem of labour scarcity was further augmented by the abolition

of slavery throughout the empire. To meet this increased demand for labourers

required for the growth of the capitalist production system, a ‘new labour regime was

inaugurated’ in which ‘labour began to flow from regions where people were

unemployed, or displaced from agriculture or cottage industries, towards regions of

heightened industrial or agricultural activity.’8

Genesis of indentured labour regime is typically linked with the emancipation

but even before the abolition of slavery, plantation lobby was arguing for the shortage

6 Title of a chapter in Hobsbawm (1996/1975). 7 Wolf (1982: 355) 8 Wolf (1982: 356, 361).


of the labour and post emancipation scenario added the requisite strength to their case.

The degree to which the abolition of slavery had an adverse impact on capitalist

production varied according to location. In those places where capitalist enterprises

had already made significant progress depending upon slave labourers, such as the

Caribbean colonies, the brunt of abolition was felt more severely than in newly

expanding regions such as Mauritius, Natal, Fiji, which had just started expanding

sugar plantation for capitalist needs. The pre-existent labourers in new areas of

expansion, without much slave population, were not sufficient or not tapped for

certain racial/ideological reasons. This made it a pressing need for the colonial

administrators and capitalists to secure labourers from outside in order to explore the

enormous potentials for the capitalist commodity production in these regions. In the

regions of slave emancipation, indentured labour filled the void left by the banning of

slave trade9 in order to save the capital investments already made in these regions.

Unlike certain other plantations like cotton in south of US and Coffee in Brazil where

planters started to change the very nature of agrarian structure by initiating

sharecropping and tenancy to cope with the post-emancipation labour shortage, sugar

planters retained the large plantation estates and persisted with the plantations

employing labourers till late 19th C. which made it obligatory for them to look for

alternative sources of labour.

Post emancipation labour crisis and opportunities for capitalist development

was explained by planters and colonial authorities in a highly racial lexicon used for

the ex-slaves and Indian population. Freed people were represented as negatively as

they could - shiftless, lazy, unreliable, heedless, happy-go-lucky, non-industrious. In

a petition to the Colonial Secretary, the West Indian Association argued for an

alternative source of labour because the 'emancipated youth were not being trained up

by their parents to industrious habits, and consequently no assistance be expected

from them in the cultivation of produce at a future time' 10

Although the abolition of slavery created a case of labour shortage, it was not

as acute as it has been articulated in the conservative narrative and certainly not the

only motivation for search of alternative labour and introduction of Indian indentured

labour regime. In many cases planters themselves did not want to employ the

9 Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 p.194 10 West Indian Association to Russell dt 17 December 1839 PP HCNo xxiii, 1840.


emancipated populations as labourers because of high wages and uncertainty of

availability. By 18th Century sugar was the king11 because it had the potential to

evolve as the product for mass consumption and did not require very sophisticated

mechanisation or crop rotation. This led to kind of a sugar revolution across the

empire which got the additional capital investment in form of monetary compensation

the planters got for the emancipation of their slave labour. However sugarcane

plantation and sugar production required a very regimented/ disciplined labour regime

for numerous tasks associated with the rigorous cultivation process for expeditious

shifts within the cultivation. Apart from the cultivation, the production process was

also very arduous – ripped cane was to be ground or milled within few hours of being

cut, expressed cane juice must be boiled and evaporated on the spot. It involved

industrial and agricultural process requiring heavy investment in equipment. All these

created an anxiety among the planters to ensure the availability of labour, uncertainty

was something they could not afford. Therefore they had to push for a labour regime

in which the availability of labour was ensured in long term, and which could be done

with a ‘free labour market’ logic.

In the process of economic restructuring and rationalisation of sugar plantation

in post emancipation period, planters wanted to eliminate the non-productive or less

productive segments of the existing labour force: aged and infirm people, children and

women and replace them with able bodied, young, docile men from India. The other

factor was the abundance of unexplored land in these colonies. Planters wanted to

develop such land as sugar plantations with the help of more capital investments and

labour employment and it was presented to colonial authorities as a unique

opportunity to expand the spread and volume of the colonial capitalist enterprise. 12

Post emancipation, sugar production declined dramatically and market value

of estates declined. In the case of British Guiana, 53% of ex-slaves left the plantation

and this reduced the sugar production by 40 per cent.13 Several experiments were

being tried which included bringing ex-slaves from other parts, introduction of

labourers from Portugal, China etc. but none of these suited the planters who wanted a

complete control over the labour and ensure their long term availability. After

11 Alan Admason p.6 12 PP HC No xxiii, 1840 13 Mandle, Jay R. The Plantation Economy pp.20-24.


experimenting unsuccessfully with Chinese and African indentured labour schemes,

Indian indentured labour was rationalized and preferred on the basis of the natural

suitability of Indians to the requirements of plantation labour.

The underlying changes in the normative structure of capitalist system towards

the end of 18th century – from a trading capitalist order interested only in trading

profits to an industrial capitalist order with a tenacity for profit maximisation through

efficient agricultural commodity production encouraged the ideological deliberations

over the search of alternative labour regimes because slavery, with its inherent non-

productive obligations towards the slave labourers, was no longer perceived as an

efficient and cost effective labour regime. Under the new political-economic

rationalism of empire, influenced by the ideas of Adam Smith, slavery was not

considered to be very productive labour regime because it was not providing any

incentives to the labourers. Slaves were not allowed to get wages or acquire property

that severely curtailed the possibilities of capital formation among them. They had no

motivation to perform the tasks assigned to them and this affected the production

process in negative manner and so the need for the new set of labour.

Indian Indentured Labour Regime

Planters resisted establishing the ‘free market labour regime’ on the grounds

that free labourers lacked regularity and argued for a contract labour regime that could

assure the continuity and dependability of the agrarian labourers. They had already

invested large sums of capital in setting up and developing the plantations and they

needed a committed labour supply with their absolute authority over the labourers.

To ensure the availability of migrant labourers in abundance, the plantation

lobby preferred the contract system against the free labour because it ensured the

availability of labourers for a fixed period and also had the possibility of further

extension. The regions towards which the planters could look for the supply of

contract labourers as a last resort were the ‘densely populated’ regions of Asia –

China, Japan, India and few a Pacific Islands. One of the most important, though not

because of its size but because of its spread and perplexing consequences, among

such flows of labourers was the immigration of Indian labourers to work on plantation


settlements like Mauritius, Trinidad, Fiji, Guiana, etc. as contract labourers14 is

known as Indian indentured labour regime.

1. Imperial Liberalism and Noblesse Oblige: Ideological Debates and

Dilemmas

Mouat, F.G., Rough Notes of a Trip to Reunion, Mauritius and Ceylon, Calcutta, 1852

Triumph of emancipation was employed to push for the liberal, reformist

ethos of the empire and to serve as the salient moral justification for the colonial

subordination. Imperial edifice was based on the liberal paternalist impulse where

imperial domination was presented not just an effective but also a legitimate tool of

moral and material progress of colonized people – civilizing mission. In this backdrop,

the imperial political order did not want a postemancipation labour regime which 14 There was another stream of immigration of Indian labourers to work on plantations in Malaya, Burma and Ceylon but as a conscious choice, I haven’t discussed them in this paper because the immigrant labourers to these destinations were recruited under a different system which led a debt bondage of labour-master relationship and thus require different analytical treatment.


would dent such a triumph and risk the hard earned legitimization of the imperial

territorial expansion. However, the imperatives of intensification of capitalism,

largely through plantations, made it indispensible to find a labour regime which not

only source the labour but also made them available in long run with minimum

remunerations in order to facilitate maximum accumulation.

Colonial plantation lobby, which was often closely linked with the political

authority in London through business interests or family relations, tried to persuade

the legislators to bring labour from India under a contract system know as indenture.

While they did underline the fact that postemancipation labour shortage would

debilitate the imperial prosperity, the core of their campaign was aimed at appealing

the noblesse oblige of the empire and free labour. In a petition to the Queen, in

December 1839, the 'Clergy, planters, merchants and other inhabitants' of British

Guiana requested the Queen for permission to recruit labourers from 'vast population

of India' which would give undercompensated Indian labourers the opportunity to sell

their labour 'where the fertility of the soil, and demand for their labour, will ensure the

comfortable, even abundant subsistence.' 15 A more pronounced argument for imperial

benevolence could be found in the letter of the London West Indian Merchants'

Association to Colonial Secretary John Russell in which they demanded to import

labourers from India where 'hundreds of thousands of the natives ..were starved to

death in 1838, in various parts of that overpopulated country, which is well known to

be afflicted with a frightful dearth at times'. 16

This was supposed to be an act of humanity, on the part of the British

government, to give the inhabitants of those regions across to a country capable of

affording profitable employment to industrious labourers for ages to come, and where

such dreadful calamities as that just adverted to are utterly unknown; a country where

they would also have the means of obtaining religious instruction' 17

This idea of imperial benevolence and noblesse oblige was essentially based

on a understanding of India as a static repressive social order, starving land of despair

and it was adopted by the colonial authorities as they would see this as one solution to 15 PP, HC, No XXIII, 1840 Petition to Queen from British Guiana dt 21 December 1839 16 ibid West Indian Association to Russell dt 17 December 1839 17 ibid West Indian Association to Russell dt 17 December 1839


several predicaments of the empire: resolve the labour crisis in plantations,

underemployment, starvation and despair in India and problems of immorality and

heathenism at both the locations. Emphasis on the positive good would also serve to

pacify the apprehensions of servitude in the anti-Indenture lobby. Secretary of State

found it as ‘among the few resources open to the sufferers for escaping these

calamities (poverty and distress), one is emigration to Mauritius..’18 On a much more

complex and greater ideological level of legitimisation of the indenture system, it was

described ‘as a powerful agent of civilisation.’19 Indneture labour regime enabled the

colonial administrators to manage the allegiance of the colonial planters and

capitalists without loosing the moral high ground it had assumed for itself with

abolition.

When the Indenture system was attacked by the anti-slavery liberal groups and

public in india for alleged explotation and having dehumanising vestigaes of slavery,

plantation lobbies and the colonial authorities underlined the material/moral benefits

it brought to the indentured labourers and help them survive the economic desperation

and oppressive social order. Committee on Labour Requirements in Mauritius

underlined this transformation by contrasting the physical appearance of labourers

before and after the emigration to Mauritius – ‘from poor, sickly, emaciated to the

state of healthy, form filled out and muscles developed.’20

This initial attempt to underline the benefits of indentured immigration for the

distressed Indians by comparing their appearance in India and the colony continued

throughout. Dr Comins who was deputed by the Indian government to enquire about

the condition of Indian immigrants in West Indies, wrote in 1891:

‘No one who knows the Indian Cooly well can fail to be struck by the great

difference between the cooly in India and his children born in the colony… The

children born in the colony of Indian parents revert to a higher type of civilization,

18 Letter from Sec of State for Colonies, Further Papers Respecting East Indian Labourers, 1842. 19 Prinsep 1841 20 Report of Committee on Causes for Labour Insufficiency in Mauritius


and in appearance, manners and intelligence are so much superior to their parents that

it is difficult to believe they belong to the same family’.21

Sanderson Committee, which was appointed to enquire about the condition of

Indian emigrants and general working of the system in 1910, presents this out of the

ordinary transformation through following allegory:

“A young Indian gentleman from Trinidad, who had come to England to

complete his education and had just been called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn, also came

before us. His father had originally arrived in the Colony as an indentured coolie, but

had eventually himself become a landed proprietor,..”22

This viewpoint has influenced the revisionist historiography of recent times

where indenture system has been perceived and analysed as the ‘escape hatch’23 for

the desperate populations from India – the only way of survival and ‘an increase in

opportunities, incentives to industry, security, and release from the bondage of

traditional custom, caste prejudice and social disapproval.’24 By doing a semiotic

analysis of tow contrasting images – of a meek, weak indentured immigrant arriving

on plantation and welldressed, confident image of a successful professional (or even

the head of a postcolonial state) of indentured descent, the revisioning historiography

portrays the Indian indnetured labourers and the labour diaspora as ‘beneficiaries of

empire’.

Since emigration as indentured labourer had been placed as the only option for

survival of Indian population and the empire seem to be providing for not only the

survival but exceptional opportunities for progress, I have tried to reevaluate this

imperial compassion by looking at the factors in creating the conditions of despair in

india and the role of empire in creating these conditions. We we have a substantial

body of scholarly work which establishes beyond doubt the role of empire in creating

21 Note on Emigration to West Indies, p.8

22 Report of Sanderson Committee, 1910, p.1.

23 Emmer, P.C. ‘The Meek Hindu: The Recruitment of Indian Indentured Labourers for Services Overseas. 1870-1916’. In Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour Before and After Slavery, edited by P. C. Emmer. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984. p.204 24 Cumpston, I.M. Indians Overseas in British Territories, 1834-54. London: Dowsons, 1969. p. 162.


the conditions of despair in India which pushed the population to those distant

plantation colonies. These scholars have tried to explain the factors for emigration by

establishing links between migration statistics and famine25, de-industrialisation, de-

peasantisation, forced commercialization, political instability etc.26and empirically

established the responsibility of colonial rule for creating a crisis situation in which

people were forced to migrate. Panchanan Saha has eloquently evaluated failure of

colonial government in redressing the grievances of peasantry in unfavourable natural

conditions and has linked the figures of migration with crop failures or famine and

concluded that ‘during the years of famine or sub-famine colonial emigration was

heavy’.27

The other important factor which pushed Indian population out of country was

‘deindustrialization’ or decline of traditional industries and manufacturing like

weaving due to the negative policies of colonial rule which prohibited the growth of

indigenous industries by various methods of taxation including unfair countervailing

duties and which promoted the penetration of machine made cheaper products into the

village communities. 28 This rampant deindustrialization created a massive

unemployed workforce which had no other means of subsistence but to emigrate to 25 Tinker Hugh. A New System of Slavery: The Import of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-‐1920. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. pp. 118-‐119.

26 Hugh Tinker, New System of Slavery; Saha, Panchanan. Emigration of Indian Labour. 1834-‐1900. Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1970; and Charavarty, Latika. ‘Emergence of an Industrial Labour force in a Dual Economy; British India, 1880-‐1920’, Indian Economic and Social History Review XV, No. 3(1978); Pradipta Chaudhuri. ‘The Impact of Forced Commercialization on the Pattern of Emigration from Orissa, 1901-‐1921’ in Essays on the commercialization of Indian Agriculture, edited by K.N. Raj. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985.; Jan Braman and E. Valentine Daniel. ‘The Making of a Coolie’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 19, Nos. 3-‐4, (April-‐July 1992) pp. 268-‐295. Emmer P.C.. ‘The Meek Hindu: The Recruitment of Indian Indented Labourers for Service Overseas, 1870-‐1916’ in Colonialism and Migration; Indentured Labour Before and After Slavery, edited by P.C. Emmer. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986; Kondapi, C. Indians Overseas, 1838-‐1949, Delhi: OUP, 1951.

27 Saha has very eloquently linked the negative effects of British rule in India both economic and political, to the migration of India labourers overseas, Saha, Emigration of Indian Labour, p. 74.

28 ‘They (mills of Paisley and Manchester) were created by the sacrifice of the Indian manufacturers. British goods were forced upon her without paying any duty, and the foreign manufacture employed the arm of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor.’ Desai,A.R. Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1976. p. 82.


locations outside India. In eastern districts of North Western Provinces, (later United

Provinces) ‘the weavers had taken themselves to agriculture or other labour, to menial

services, emigration to Mauritius, and even elsewhere and even to begging’.29 Similar

was the fate of weavers from South where having lost their means of livelihood,

weavers were going to Bourbon and Mauritius in large numbers.30

The ruination of indigenous manufacturing can be illustrated through the story

of cotton in the most evocative manner. India was a major producer and exporter of

cotton textile exported about 100 million yards of cotton per year in 1700 and almost

78% of total Asian imports into Britain was cotton textiles from India.31 Following

colonial intervention which included a ban on import of cotton textile from India, and

restructuring of agrarian systems, by 1896 India produced only about 8% of the cotton

it consumed. Rest was imported from Britain. 32 In this entire process, discussed as

de-industrialization millions of cotton growers, weavers got dispossessed and had no

option but to look for engagement in the alleged ‘free labour market’.

My work attempts to problematise this revisionist portrayal also by

comprehensive investigation (later in this paper) of certain domains of the benefit –

wage payment, labour mobility, women empowerment and by drwaing attention to

the benefits plantation enterprise could attain through the indentured labourers. Since

2. Regulations of System

Absence of any regulatory mechanism was considered to be the root of all the

evils associated with slavery and therefore to move away from the shadow of slavery,

colonial administrators and propounders of indenture regime were prompt in initiating

a well outlined regulatory structure for conducting the process. Regulatory framework

and offices were created more with an intention to legitimise the system by making a

careful dissociation with slavery rather than to effectively control the inaccuracies. It 29 Indian Revenue Proceedings, No. 22, June 1864, cited in Saha, Emigration of Indian Labour. p. 59.

30 Collector of Godavari district to Board of Revenue. dt. 14 April 1834, cited in Dharma Kumar. Land and Caste in South India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. p. 130.

31 K N Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1978 p. 507, 547 32 Peter Harnetty, The Imperialism of Free Trade: Lancashire, India and the Cotton Supply Question


was this regulatory structure and interventions of state which were suppose to

distinguish the indenture labour from the slavery.33 In the process the basic relations

between the capital and labour were recreated, redefined and rearticulated through

these regulations.

These regulations relating to the indentured labour regime can be understood

more effectively by dividing them into two domains, according to their scope. First

set of regulations were intended to regulate the system: various functional aspects of it

like recruitment, transportation, working hours, plantation process etc. The second set

of regulations was decreed to deal with the human beings: the indentured labourers

and their actions and attitudes.

Such elaborate legal structure and detailing of regulations was needed for the

smooth functioning of the indentured system and also to ensure the compliance of the

labourers which was moored, as Look Lai asserts in the case of Caribbean, in Marxist

assumptions that labour in the colonies had to be compelled through “artificial” (i.e.

legal) means.34 This was considered to be influence by the progressive despotism

(James Mill) in which barbaric techniques were seen as legitimate measures of

coercion as coolies were inherently incapable of reciprocity.

Disciplining the labour was new discourse in the domain of agrarian labour

regime which was justified on grounds of maintaining the high mortal order.

Regulations, disciplinary measures and retributions were given a veneer of morality,

though they were based on similar ideologies of racial supremacy and discrimination

as in case of slavery.

Indian labourers were described as habitual idlers, compulsive liars, immoral

and defiant who needed to be handled sternly. Royal Commission of Mauritius

admitted it in no uncertain terms:

‘..as a class, the Indians are regarded with fear and distrust, as dangerous and

lawless vagabonds; or at least, with pitying contempt, as ill-regulated children,

fit only to be treated accordingly’. 35

33 Marina Carter 34 Look Lai p127 35 Report of Royal Commission Mauritius 1875


Articulation and assertion of racial differences between the communities was

part of the dual process of creation and segmentation of the labourers under

indentured regime – first stigmatise population and then relegate them in the

hierarchical order to rationalise their exploitation, use of coercive methods, lower

remunerations and denial of certain rights like choice of work and protest.

Vagrancy and desertion of estates were considered as a moral threat to the

plantation order than merely the material loss of labour but desertion could be caused

because of ill treatment, low wages, or other repressions in the labour regime was

never admitted by the planters or the colonial authorities.

Enactment of regressive labour laws under the indentured system like that of

1867 in Mauritius reflects the ascendency of plantation lobby over the colonial

authorities and defining influence of economic concerns over the political and moral

concerns of the colonial government.

The need to secure a bound and disciplined labour force that was compliant,

reliant, and consistent was ensured legally by segregating indentured coolies spatially,

socially, and occupationally.36

According to Rodney, immigrants under indenture were underpaid and were

“denied the rights to seek out new employers,” implying that their position as “free”

labourers was very much conditioned by their contracts and their “freedoms” more

restricted than other tiers of “free” labourers.37 In addition to industrial control, a

series of legal regulations like vagrancy legislations restricted the mobility of

indentured labourers. East Indian indentured labourers experienced a series of abuses,

hostilities and brutal “punishments” on the part of planters.38

The fundamental logic of the regulations of indenture labour regime was

determined by the capitalist rationale of ‘enforced regularity, punctuality, uniformity

and routine’. Such copious deliberations over the regulation and state intervention in

the indentured regime were part of the strenuous efforts made by the colonial

government, under the compulsions imposed by the liberals, to place it out of the

shadow of slavery. But, ‘the great irony, of course, is that so much of the

36 Munasinghe Callaloo p.76 37 Walter Rodney, A History of Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 38 Ron Ramdin pp.54-67


paraphernalia of the new institutional discipline bore such striking resemblance to that

of the slave plantation. Centralised surveillance, regimentation, division of labour,

strictly controlled work pace, written rules and regulations were all standards pursued

by every planter, though not always attained. It was as if part of society would have to

be enslaved to preserve the liberties of the rest.’ 39

Colonial authorities tried to promote indentured labour regime as an

egalitarian system which provided the same legal rights to the planters and the

labourer. The penal provisions in the laws regulating the indenture system for

violating the conditions of indenture were applicable to both – the planters and the

labourers. However the rate of conviction for violation of indentured labour laws

reveal the divergences in the role of legal institutions and colonial state: 72% of

indentured labourers charged under labour laws were convicted while the conviction

rate for the planters or their representative was only about 10% in Suriname.40 For

Fiji, 82% of the labourers charged under violation of labour laws between 1885 and

1906 were convicted41 In Trinidad and Guiana between 1880 and 1917 about 25% of

the total indentured population was prosecuted under labour laws. In contrary the

complaints against planters or managers were so low that Immigration department in

Trinidad did not keep a record of it.42

Postemancipation concept of work embraces more than just the specific tasks

to be performed or specific outputs to be realized but it also implied the regulations of

lives of labourers to assure a disciplined workforce resulting in certain kind of

gouvernementalite43 of the indenture system. New ways of articulating and exerting

control and coercion were part of what Focault described as gradual permeation of

modes of control and discipline. Planters with collaboration of colonial

administration, succeeded in systematic domination discipline and control of labour

by combining strategies of contract and restrictions on their spatial mobility to

immobilize the mobile labour.

39 Thomas Halt: The Problem of Freedom, p.38

40 P C Emmer : Importation of British Indians in Suriname p. 107 41 Brij Diaspora p.176 42 Report McNeill p.29 43 Use it to underline the articulation of a wide range of control techniques and exercise of authority beyond the work place.


Colonial state also developed structures and institutions for the protection of

labourers in order to articulate its paternalistic attitude and as assertion of the

benevolence towards the subjects – appointment of the Protector of Immigrants,

provisions for medical care, standards for housing, minimum wages, protection

against physical abuse etc. These provisions were used by the colonial state and pro

indenture officials to initiate and then defend the continuation of indenture system

despite all round critic of the system for being exploitative, discriminatory and

extension of slavery. As late as in 1909 when the evils associated with indenture

system were universally accepted, Governor of British Guiana underlined the good

things for the indentured labourers:

‘Indenture means care in sickness, free medical attendance, free hospital

accommodation, morning rations in early days, sanitary dwellings, habits of

industry gained, a guaranteed minimum daily wage, and general supervision

by government officials.’ 44

What this defence fails to underline is that the guaranteed wages remained the

same over almost the entire century, and almost 1/3 of the total labourers were subject

to prosecution under the labour laws.

There were several contrary assumptions regarding the capability and

compliance of labourers were adopted and there was a rather uneasy reconciliation of

such assumptions in regulations of indenture labour.

3. Essentials of Indenture

For a critical exploration of any postemancipation labour regime, three

essential questions are most describing: first, how the labourers have been introduced

in the regime or labour mobilisation; second how the labourers have been

remunerated for their labour or wage payments; and the extent to which they had the

freedom to move out of the obligations of labour regime or freedom of movement. I

would like to explore these three interspersed domains of indenture labour regime in

order to delineate certain specifics and elaborate certain arguments relating to the

features and functioning of the indentured regime argued through the rather restrictive

binary of virtues/vices (of the system) by the most of the scholars. To set the 44 Report of Sanderson Committee, 1910 p.27:568


backdrop, to evaluate certain misnomers about the labourers and to trace a dynamic

pattern in evolution of capitalist plantation enterprise, I would like to start with an

account of social origings on emigrants and their destinations.

3.1. Social Origins

In order to underline the subordinate status of Indian indentured labourers in

the plantation hierarchy and therefore to justify their subjugation and segregation,

colonial authorities highlighted their belongings from the lower strata of the Indian

social order. George Grierson noted in 1883 that ‘only the lowest castes emigrate and

that nothing will ever induce men of higher class of life to leave India.’ 45 Scholars

have defied this assertion for Indian emigrants across all the locations. A detailed

study of the origins of Indian indentured labourers in Fiji, Brij Lal has shown the

domination of intermediary castes among the migrants. Amonng the indnetured

immigrants for Fiji between 1880 and 1916 Brahmins and high castes constituted

about 12%, intermediary castes 43%; lower castes 33% and Muslims 12% 46 My own

study of immigrants in Mauritius shows that not more than 28 to 35 % of immigrants

could be ascribed to the lower castes. Even some of the colonial reports counter the

claims made about the low caste origins of the indentured labourers. One of the most

comprehensive reports on this regime, prepared by Geoghegan (1873), shows that

emigrants from higher castes were 21 %, respectable agricultural castes 38 %, artisan

castes 13 %, and low castes 27 %. 47

3.2. Destinations

Emigration of Indian labourers under indentured system began in 1834.

Mauritius was the first British plantation settlement to receive Indian indentured

labourers, followed by British Guiana, Trinidad, Natal, Reunion, Ceylon, Malaya,

Burma, etc. Fiji was the last British colony to get indentured labourers from India in

1878. Emigration of Indian indentured labourers was not confined to the British

settlements but following the abolition of slavery in French colonies in 1846 and in

Dutch colonies in 1873, they also entered into agreements with the colonial

45 Grierson Report 46 Brij Lal Origins, 47 Geoghegan had analysed 1,659 emigrants who left from Calcutta for Mauritius between April and July 1872. Geoghegan Report, p. 68.


government to labourers from India. Subsequently French Caribbean received 79,089

Indian labourers between 1851 and 1890s and Dutch Guiana (Suriname) received

more than 34,000 Indian labourers during 1873-1916.48

Immigration of Indian Labourers under Indenture System to Various

Destinations

Destination Period Indian Immigrants

Mauritius 1834-1912 453,063

British Guiana 1838-1917 238,909

Natal 1860-1911 152,184

Trinidad 1845-1917 143,939

Reunion 1829-1924 118,000

Fiji 1879-1916 60,969

Jamaica 1854-1885 36,420

Suriname 1873-1916 34,000

According to requirements of the sugar plantation and preferences, one could

also draw a changing pattern in destinations which helps us understand the core of

sugar plantation and production.

48 Northrup, Indentured Labour, Table A .1, p.156-‐57; Clarke, Colin, Ceri Peach and Steven Vertovec, (eds.) South Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity, CUP, Cambridge, 1990, ‘Introduction’, p.9.


3.3. Labour Mobilisation

Mobilising the labourers for emigration under indenture system a subject of

grave concern for the planters and colonial governments primarily for two reasons:

first, an effective labour mobilisation strategy was essential for securing the required

supply of labourers and second, the malpractices associated with mobilisation of

labourers such as kidnapping, deception etc. would earn an ill repute for the indenture

system and damage the liberal appreciation it had earned for abolition of slavery.

Historiography of the indentured labour mobilisation is polarized, as usual,

between the two dissimilar opinions – the ‘deception approach’ and the ‘free choice

approach’. The deception approach, first promulgated by the anti indenture groups

such as ‘British and Foreign Anti Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society’ and

Indian nationalists and later adopted by Hugh Tinker and many others, lay emphasise

on the incidents of fraudulent methods, kidnapping in the recruitment system and

question the recruits’ ability to understand the complexities of the contract.49 As an

antithesis to the ‘deception approach’ which asserts that the emigrants were forced

49 Tinker, Hugh, New System of Slavery; Saha, Panchanan, Emigration of Indian Labour.

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

93.5

66.6

30.6 14.7

4.7 0

6.5

33.4

62.5 71

29.6 51.3

0 0 0

0.5

6.9

32.7

0 0 6.6 12.9

58.6

11.4

% of total im

migration

Years

Out2lows of Indian Indentured Labour

Others

South and East Africa

Fiji

Caribbean

Indian Ocean Islands


into indentured emigration, the free choice approach 50 put emphasise on the

‘informed choice of emigrants’ and argue that the labour mobilization strategy was

merely tapping of the stream of migratory workers by the colonial recruiting agencies

which already existed 51 in the localities. The primary function of recruiting

mechanism, according to this approach, was only to facilitate and direct the stream of

emigrants towards the specific locations. Both these approaches, however, miss the

dynamic elements in the labour mobilisation. The recruitment of indentured labourers

was conducted through a ‘mobilisation strategy’ which evolved in a historical process

as per the needs of the destinations and the circumstantial necessities to maintain the

inflow of emigrants. Since the sourcing of labourers was one of the most critical and

controversial part of the indenture system, almost all the legislations related to the

indenture addressed this aspect.

The system of indentured emigration began as a private initiative of Mauritian

planters. These planters would send their requirements of labourers to the various

firms located in port towns in India who would then procure labourers through local

recruiters, known as arkatis, duffadars (in north India) and 52maistries (in South

Western India). These recruiters were paid ‘per head’ or according to the numbers of

emigrants recruited by them. With the joining of other destinations, demands rose and

the recruitment operation expanded manifold. Large number of firms set up

operations53 to procure labourers through native recruiters and the primary motive of

both the agencies of indentured recruitment, the recruiting firms and recruiters, were

to meet the demand from the colony at any cost and by every possible means. They

resorted to unfair means like deception, kidnapping etc. which attracted severe

criticism for the system and eventually it was suspended by the colonial Indian

government in 1839. However, under the severe pressure from the planters and to

safeguard the interests of capitalist, indenture was resumed in 1842 with direct control

of Indian government on the entire process of labour mobilisation. In effect, though

50 Emmer,P.C., The Meek Hindu, Lal, Brij. V., Girmitiyas. Lal however admits the existence

of frauds and deception in recruitment. 51 Emmer, Meek Hindu, p.189. 52 Papers Respecting the East Indian Labourers Bill 1838, Report of Mr. JP Woodcock, dt. 19

November 1836. Report of Dickens Committee, p. 2. 53 In Calcutta some of the prominent firms engaged in procuring labourers were – Gillanders,

Arbuthnot & Co.; Chapman and Barelay Smith,Ewing and Co.; Honley Dowson and Bestel, Jardine, Lyall Matheson & Co., Scott and Co., etc. Report of Dickens Committee; Prog. No.46, Gen.(Emi.), dt. 17 March 1841, WBSA.


nothing much changed. Commenting upon the vainness of any regulatory measure in

effectively removing the abuses associated with the labour mobilisation, John Scoble,

Secretary of the British and Foreign Anti Slavery Society, described the system as

‘incurably vicious’54 in light of the numerous reporting of abuses and instances of

kidnapping and forced mobilisation. Such instances of malpractices continued

throughout the system, despite a very well intended but poorly implemented,

regulatory mechanism. Planters’ concern was to reduce the costs of introduction of

labourers and for that they were willing to manipulate any structure. In 1870s,

evidence before Geoghegan, who was preparing a comprehensive report on

emigration from India, described the recruitment as ‘a regularly organized system of

kidnapping’55. Similarly in 1880s, two enquiries conducted by Major Pitcher in UP

and Grierson in Bengal uncovered the pervasiveness of fraudulent methods in

recruitment.56 These instances and evidence for the abuses in the labour mobilisation

for indenture are mentioned here not to repudiate the historical fact that many of these

labourers entered into indenture system by their own choice but only to put caution

for the revisionist scholarship which compares this labour mobilisation with any

modern day system of recruitment.

3.4. Wage Payments

Payment of monetary remuneration or wages was possibly the most

discernible feature of indentured labour used by the colonial authorities and capitalists

to demarcate the differences with the slavery and count the advantages it could

provide to the labourers in improving their lot. Indian immigrants who were

introduced to work in plantation colonies were to receive a certain amount of cash57

as wages and food and cloth allowances were in addition to that. In addition to these,

they were also provided free housing on the estates and free medical attendance. In

the colonial perception this was bliss for the Indian labourers because in India these

labourers hardly earned more than two rupees a month and that too without any

additional allowance which they received in these locations. 58 For some

54 PP, Vol. xxxv, No. 530, 1844, 55 Geoghegan Report, 1873, p. 63. 56 Report of Major Pitcher, 1882; Report of George Grierson, 1883. 57 For Mauritius it was 5 Rs a month and in Trinidad it was 1 s per day. 58 Letter of R. Brenan, dt. 24 May 1845, The Labour and Indian Immigration Question at

Mauritius, July, 1845.


contemporary observers, the rate of wages in India was even less59 and there was a

general consensus that the wages offered in Mauritius were enormously high

compared to wages in India and therefore the Indian labourers better their condition

by emigrating to plantation settlements as indentured labourers. This proviso for

remuneration is also used by the revisionist scholarship to argue in favour of the

freedom of the indentured labourers as it provided them enough economic resources

at their disposal and thus reduced their dependence on the planters. But what were the

hard realities of these glorified high wages – did the immigrants actually receive what

was claimed to be their remuneration or did it remain an ‘unfulfilled expectation’60 –

needs an elaborate and critical examination. In the very beginning of the system in

1834, Indian immigrants were employed on five rupees a month to work on

plantations and it was anticipated by the administrators that this would increase with

time and rising fortunes of the sugar economy. But unfortunately this increase never

took place and the figure of wages paid to the immigrant labourers remained same for

more than eighty years with occasional and short-lived increases. It even decreased on

several occasions with the sinking fortunes of sugar economy. Such trend of

remarkably stable wages were found in other locations such as Trinidad and British

Guiana.

Table 1

Statement of Monthly Wages paid to Indian Immigrants

Year Average Monthly Wages (Rupees/

Month)*

1834 5

1848 5 – 7

1873 4 – 7

1881 5 – 7.42

1892 5 – 7.5

1898 4.54 – 5.44

1909 6

1915 5 – 6

59 Proposal of Free Labour Association of Mauritius, PP, Vol. xxxx, No.26, 1842. 60 Carter, Marina, Servants, p. 177.


Source: PP, Vol. xxxvii, No. 280, 1849 (for 1848), Prog. Nos. 31-35, Gen., Emig.,

February 1874 (for 1873), Annual Report of PI, 1881 (for 1881), Prog. No. 1-8, Rev.

& Ag., Emig., December 1893 (for 1892), Prog. No. 1-7, Rev. & Ag., Emig., March

1900 ( for 1898), Report of Sanderson Committee (for 1909), Select Documents,

Vol.III, P.9 (for 1915)

* lower rates were paid to the new immigrants and the higher rates were for the re-

indenturing labourers in fifth year of service or even after that.

Apart from remarkably stable wages over 70 years, there was a big gap

between the stipulated wages and what the labourers actually received in hand. The

two main deductions put into practice by the planters were – monthly deduction for

return passage and the notorious ‘double cut’ of wages. The planters deducted one

rupee or one fifth of the total monthly wages as a security for good conduct and to

meet the passage expenses in case of their repatriation because of any misconduct.

This accumulated deduction was to be refunded to the labourers upon the completion

of the stipulated contracts. The second but most widely used by the planters and

which earned a unsavoury reputation in the narratives of labour control in Mauritius

was ‘double cut’ or deduction of two days of wages for an absence of each day,

whatever the reasons might be. The planters practiced this as early as 183961 and

planters did not need any endorsement from the authorities to double cut. Double cut

was misused rampantly by the planters and in some location like Mauritius it was

noted that double cut reduced the wage bills by one third on good estates and one half

on bad estates to what should have been actually paid to the labourers62 which earned

it the notoriety of a ‘monstrous system’.63 Despite this persuasive condemnation, the

provision of double cut remained in effect even in the supposedly pro-labour

61 Report of T. Hugon, dt 29 July, 1839, PP, Vol. xxxvii, No. 331, 1840; DWD Commins, Note

on Emigration from India to Trinidad, 1893. 62 Report of R. Mitchell, dt. 21 July, 1874, cited in Tinker, Hugh, A New System of Slavery,

p.189. 63 Report of Royal Commission, 1875, Chapter xvii, pp. 284-329.


legislation of 187864 and it was abolished only through Ordinance 13 of 1908 in

Mauritius65 ‘when indentured immigration was in its last gasp’.66

Planters used every possible excuse to defer the payment of wages in cash to

the labourers. On innumerable occasions irregular payments and heavy overdue of

wages were reported despite the strict legislative provisions for weekly or monthly

payments of wages throughout the indenture period.67 This was an effective way for

them to ensure the availability of labourers. The non-payment of wages often pushed

the labourers into a debt trap of money-lenders who were usually sirdars loyal to

planters, and it was expected that it would force the immigrants to extend the

contracts. Non-payment of wages was the most insisted upon grievance of indentured

labourers and it accounted for the largest proportion in the complaints lodged by the

indentured labourers even in times when the system was considered to be revamped

and reformed. Between 1878 and 1898, out of the total 10126 complaints made by the

indentured labourers against their employers in Mauritius, 7235 complaints were for

non payment of wages. 68 Despite this notoriety of non payment of wages, the

redressal mechanism available for labourers to reclaim their wages often proved

ineffective in ensuring the payment of wages and arrears and made the stipulated

wages into a longing which indentured labourers could not attain in most of the cases.

3.5. Freedom of Mobility

Plantation lobby demanded not only the import of labourers but also their

commitment for the longer terms which had obvious implications on the mobility and

freedom of change for the indentured labourers. Colonial authorities obliged the

plantation lobby, despite the concerns raised by the liberals, by introducing a series of

labour laws with punitive measures for disobedience and disappearance, most

notorious being the anti-vagrancy laws which institutionalised a regime of ‘voluntary

servitude’ so the name, ‘new system of slavery’. In Trinidad the penal provisions to

64 Labour laws of 1878 tried to impose some strictures for the judicious use of double cut by

making the assent of Stipendiary Magistrates mandatory. 65 Report of Sanderson Committee, 1910, Pt. III. 66 Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 189. Tinker mentions 1909 as the end of double cut. 67 Gomm to Stanley, dt. 27 February 1843, CO/ 167/ 245, PRO; PP, Vol. xxvii, No. 168,

1846; Report of Royal Commission, 1875, p. 297. 68 ARPI for years 1878-99.


ensure the adherence of contractual obligations was introduced in 1846, in Guiana in

1853 and in Mauritius in 1847.69

Indenture labour regime provides an interesting sight and structure where the

labour was mobilised in order to be introduced into the labour regime and then all the

emphasis of the order was to curb their mobility and make them immobile. Indenture

hinged upon compulsory nature of contract and penal sanctions for attempts made by

labourers to escape the contractual obligation or move beyond the confines of the

plantations.

Indentured labourers were introduced in plantation colonies for a certain

period (five years for most of the colonies) and had the freedom to move beyond the

confines of plantation, if they desire so, after the completion of contracts. However,

planters wanted them be tied under contractual obligations in order to ensure their

availability and reduce their bargaining power for increased wages as free labourers.

The choice of freedom and movement beyond plantations for the indentured labourers

was further curtailed by the monocrop economic nature of these locations where very

little vocational opportunities existed beyond the ‘sugar’. In order to ensure the

availability of indentured labourers, planters successfully negotiated with the colonial

authorities to introduce several penal provisions for the violations of obligations of

indenture, and I would like discuss in little detail, the most notorious among these -

the anti vagrancy laws intended to control the mobility of those indentured labourers

who had completed their terms, particularly Ordinance 31 of 1867 in Mauritius.

Implying their own racial prejudices, Colonial authorities began to depict the

Indian labourers, who had completed their contracts, as ‘do-nothings’, who had left

plantation work because they did not want to work.70 Since they did not have any

steady work and spent their time roaming around aimlessly, these ex-indentured

immigrants were vagrants in colonial perception who needed to be dealt accordingly.

To discipline the ex-indentured labourers and ensure that they do not indulge in

criminal activities or illegal ways of earning, all of them had to obtain a ticket with

photograph where getting the photograph only would cost them 1 Pound, quite an

amount considering their income levels. The difficulties in obtaining these passes for 69 DWD Commins Note on Emigration from India to Trinidad 1893 p.4; Gomm to Grey, dt. 3 July, 1847, CO 167/184, PRO. 70 Ibid.


an ignorant class of people, the procedural complications and the heavy charges made

it difficult for a large number of labourers to obtain it within the stipulated time. They

were at times arrested for vagrancy while going to get the pass made because usually

the estates were far off from the towns where the magistrates’ offices were located.

Employers, who were frustrated by the labourers’ refusal to remain in their service,

would often bribe the police to arrest such labourers as vagrants so they could then

reclaim them from the court. Another grasp on the pass system to control labourers’

mobility was the restricted territorial validity of these passes. All the passes were

issued for a particular district only and if an old immigrant entered into another

district on whatever pretext—whether to meet some relative or friends living on other

estates or even if by ignorance, he was liable for arrest as vagrant and on a great many

occasions they were actually arrested. Penal provisions to control vagrancy were used

so often and such large scale that a vagrant depot was set up in 1864 in Port Louis.

This was supposed to work as English ‘workhouse’, ‘aimed at discouraging idleness

and as instilling docility and a sense of duty in the potential labourers confined within

its walls.’71 Between 1861 and 1871, an average between 11.5 to 17.2 per cent of total

male Indian population in Mauritius was arrested for the charges of vagrancy.72 Such

legal provisions severely limited the geographical and occupational mobility of old

immigrants and an immigrant found in the district other than the one for which he

possessed a police pass would be a vagrant and was liable for prosecution as per the

law. It was virtually impossible for the old immigrants, almost all of whom were

illiterate or with little knowledge, to know the precise boundaries of district of their

approved habitat and thus get caught. This overzealous persuasion of anti vagrancy

laws by the colonial authorities and the planters sometimes led to bizarre incidents as

well. during one of the vagrant hunts Ramluckan, who was a gardener in

Pamplemousses district, was arrested from his house on the day he was getting

married, despite having all his papers in order, because the police thought that his

house was in Moka while he had the police pass for Pamplemousses district. 73

The severity with which vagrancy was dealt with by the Mauritian planters

and administrators attracted a lot of criticism from the observers from late 1870s

71 North-Coombs 47 72 ARPI 1861-872 73 Case of Ramluckan, Appended to the Petition of Adolphe de Plevitz, dt. 4 June 1871, CO 167/536.


onwards. These legislations were condemned for being reminiscences of the slave

laws.74 The Royal Commission found that vagrancy and labour laws amounted to

nothing less than the unbridled harassment of the Indian population.75 The real

motives of such severe anti-vagrancy legislations were the planters’ desperation to

ensure the availability of labourers at lower rates of wages in post 1860s period when

not only the fortunes of sugar economy began to sink but many labourers also started

moving out towards towns in search of alternative vocations and new prospects. Anti-

vagrancy measures were manipulated by the planters as a labour mobilization strategy

by forcing them back to plantations and preventing them to choose their desired jobs.

As Geoghegan summarises:

‘On the whole then, the tendency of Mauritius legislation has been, I think,

towards reducing the Indian labourers to a more complete state of dependence

upon the planter and towards driving him into indentures, a free labour market

being both directly and indirectly discouraged.76

Planters excessively used these regulations to restrict the mobility of Indian

labourers from plantations, curb their natural right to choose their occupation or

negotiate for higher wages after the end contractual obligations, and to force them to

re-engage on to plantation after the expiry of their initial engagements on

unfavourable terms and conditions. Vagrancy regulations denied the innate and

inalienable right of labour to choose the work of their choice, very crucial to define

their freedom.

Protesting Labourers (need more about other locations)

In most of the historical narratives of working lives of indentured labourers

there is not much being talked about their protests, possibly because they were mostly

inconspicuous and were not so heroic therefore lacked the dramatic, romantic details.

Because of extreme dependency, subordination and repressive regime it is not very

valid to expect labour rebellion from the indentured labourers. Indian labourers,

despite having awareness of their belonging to the same class, lacked the ‘class

74 Muir-Mackenzie, J.W.P., Report on the Condition of Indian Immigrants in Mauritius, nd, pp. 34–35.

75 Report of Royal Commission 76 Geoghegan Report pp 67-68


consciousness’77 and failed to discern its political ramifications. The augmentation of

class consciousness was further restrained by the severe restrictions imposed upon the

mobility of labourers off estates because the very emergence of class consciousness

required intra-community exchanges and collective initiatives. Indentured labourers

were housed on the estates itself without any links with wider socio-economic or

political networks of the island and there was no space for inter community exchanges

as well. In this secluded condition, there was no class consciousness enabling them to

relate their discontent with the other’s dissatisfaction and this explains to an extent

why the protests of Indian labourers remained individualistic and there was no

collective resistance against the repressive plantation regime for very long. Because

of all these limitations, the protests of Indian labourers have been characterised as

predominantly individualistic, covert and no great ‘mythical revolution’ took place on

the plantations in Mauritius. However we can trace events of protest in the indentured

labour regime since the very beginning though these were more covert, unstructured

and individual resistance.

Under the contractual bindings of indenture system and repressive discipline,

immigrant labourers could not openly defy the order of the authorities. In such austere

situation, apart from exploring the legal channel of protest in form of complaints to

authorities, labourers’ anguish was articulated by employing individualistic modes of

protest such as desertion, absenteeism, spontaneous attacks on the property of planters,

and in extreme distress even suicides. Borrowing the conceptual term from James

Scott and taking a cautious note of his caveat for not overly romanticising these

‘weapons of the weak’, I also try to delineate these modes of protests in terms of

‘everyday forms of resistance’ which were informal, often covert, and concerned

largely with immediate, de facto gains.78 However the nature of protest did not remain

always individualistic and covert in Mauritius. By the end of 19th C protests became

more articulate and began to occur as group actions. The most dramatic was 1937

riots over the price of sugarcane cultivated by Indian farmers. 1937 riots were so

widespread, these swept across the island. It started with cane growers’ decision for

77 I have borrowed this conceptual difference between awareness of class and class consciousness from Lukacs’ analysis. See Lukacs, Georg, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectic., Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.

78 Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Delhi: OUP, 1990, pp. 28-‐33.


not selling their cane in Union Flacq. Soon spread to other estates across island. More

radical forms of protest – burning of cane field, overturning trucks and carts

transporting cane to mills etc. took place during these riots. Most dramatic was firing

on a sugar estate where a couple of protestors died in police firing which owned by a

member of Indian Diaspora. This particular episode illustrates the larger consolidation

of working classes, supported by workers in dock, mills, vegetable growers and 1937

riots were unique in another sense that it brought the class dimension as well.

Marcell van der Linden’s suggestion to include labourers’ mutualism in the

narrative of labourers’ protest adds a lot to the conceptual paradigm of protest in this

context. Mutualism did not aimed at resistance or aggression agsainst the system or its

agents but a way to extend asistance to each other in case of difficulty. We see a lot of

tincidennts of mutualism happening in 1860s and 70s, during severe transformations

of labour regimes, when Indian communities helped each other to set up schools for

their children, provided financial assistance to acquire property etc.79

Free Labour vs ‘New System of Slavery’: Moral Domination

and Nature of the Indenture Regime

Typological dichotomy of free and unfree labour is incessant in historiography

of indnetured Indian labour regimes because of the long shadow of slavery and use of

slavery as institution to set the derivative discourse of analysis. Because of being built

on debris of slavery, planters anxiety to control their labour in most stringent manner,

and several repressive, exploitative and dehumanising intruments of labour

regimentation in indenture system it was slammed for being ‘new system of slavery’

by the anti-indenture liberal lobby in Britain and continues till date in the

historiography. While many scholars find this a matter of perspective as the

qualitative differences are not that significant but differed only in degrees. It is nearly

impossible to draw the definitive distinction between the free and unfree labour and

place the indentured labour regime in only one of these.

79 I have explored this in more detail in Mishra, Amit ‘ Sardars, Kanganies and Maistries: Intermediaries in Indian Labour Diaspora’ in Sigrid Wadauer et al eds. History of Labour Intermediation, Berghahn Book 2015


Despite this problematic of tenacious indistinctness in probing the nature of

labour regime and conceptual incongruity in labelling it either as free or unfree labour,

I would like to engage with this debate essentailly to examine the universalistic claims

of modern capitalism for all labour post-emancipation being commodified and free

wage labour. 80 This will also help to reassert the case of differentials in treatment

towards colonised people and colonial subjugation as a decisive factor in determing

the nature of labour regime.

This work perceives the indentured labour regime as a dynamic construct

which had long transformative trajectories in terms of regimenting the labour and

labour’s relations with the capital. Therefore it is historically inappropriate to analyse

the nature of this regime through a single analytic mould because the degrees of

servitude were not static or permanent phenomena. These continue to change

according to priorities of global capital and plantation enterprise.

I approach this question by examining two domains of servitude – the physical

and the moral. The two determinants of physical domination/freedom – freedom of

mobility and economic freedom (wage payments) I have already discusssed in detail

earlier so I will focus here on the moral domination.

The second level of the unfreedom of indentured labour is the moral

domination of indentured labourers which has been somehow missing in the existing

literature, primarily because of its attempts to make the debate pragmatic and

dispassionate. The planters tried to establish their moral domination over the

indenture labour through attempts to dehumanise and demoralise them and using the

most pejorative lexicon while referring to them. The moral domination was being

attempted to establish through a two-fold technique—indentured labour was referred

in derogatory, dehumanizing terms in the language of command and blamed all the

wrongs on plantations.

Indenture system was described ‘as a powerful agent of civilisation’ which

not only cared for economic and physical improvement of the indentured labourers

but for their social and moral advancement as well which made them suitable for the

new, civilized world. It worked as ‘rightful engine’ for the coolies enabling them to 80 This has been effectively criticized in European context as well e.g. Work of Lucassens


realise the gains from this system which eventually enabled them to improve their lot

and made this transformation possible. This rationale has been adopted by certain

scholars in recent times who see the indenture system as the ‘escape hatch’ —the only

way of survival and ‘an increase in opportunities, incentives to industry, security, and

release from the bondage of traditional custom, caste prejudice and social

disapproval.’81In the language of command, indentured labourers were referred as

‘coolies’, habitual idlers, nuisances, compulsive liars and immoral and were often not

even considered as human beings. Right from the time of embarkation they were

subjected to ill-treatment and racial discrimination. Ramdin, a sirdar who returned

from Mauritius, reported about the ill-treatment and racial abuses by the ship captain

towards the emigrants who refused to comply with his orders.82

For the high mortality rate during transportation and on plantations,

indentured labourers’ dirty habits and unhealthy way of life was blamed. Dr Browne,

the infamous doctor of the ship Nimrod who was accused by the women on board of

sexual harassment and rape, stated in his defence:

The Indian will do nothing of his own accord and very little by merely told.

Whatever he does, he must be forced to do. ... They are exceedingly dirty in

their habits, and unless cleanliness is rigidly enforced, there is likelihood of

disease breaking out amongst them.83

Dr Browne’s defence for his actions was mere repetition of the usual colonial

justification for their inconsiderate attitude towards the Indian emigrants, based on

racial prejudices.

When they tried to escape the harshness of the work schedule, they were

condemned as lazy idlers who needed to be dealt with severity and their idleness was

held responsible for the low production. In colonial narratives, Indian labourers were

described as lazy, unreliable and prone towards criminal behaviour and therefore they

81 Cumpston :1969, p.162 82 Statement of Ramdin, dt. 10 December 1840, Examination of Coolies returned from Mauritius. OIOC. 83 Appendix to Proc. No. 6–8, Rev., Ag and Comm (Emig), May 1873, NAI


deserved stern handling. This was admitted in the Report of Royal Commission in no

ambiguous terms,

...as a class, the Indians are regarded with fear and distrust, as dangerous and

lawless vagabonds; or at least, with pitying contempt, as ill-regulated children,

fit only to be treated accordingly.84

Similar was the response when they complained of sickness—‘when they

(Indian labourers) complained of sickness, the doctor said they were lazy.’ 85

Authorities of the indenture regimen used these instruments to dehumanize and

demoralize the labour and therefore trim down their mental strength so that they

should accept the authority and domination of the planters and obey their commands

without any possibility of defiance and resistance. This was used also to justify the

coercive labour management strategy because somewhere deep in the minds of the

planters and colonial authorities remained what Montesquieu somewhere argued to

defend coercion in slavery—‘Africans were not quite human and people from tropical

lands needed coercion because the climate made them slothful.’

Indentured labour regime aimed to make Indian indentured labourers ‘more

obedient as it becomes more useful’86 and for that end not only the physical but the

moral domination was also considered be part of the labour regimentation.

Women Emancipation and Moral Advancement

As part of the civilising mission, the assisted imperial labour relocation was

supposed to emancipate Indian women from clutches of patriarchy and promote moral

advancement of the community. These were primarily emancipation of women and

their economic independence, and the moral advancement of the Diasporic

community. Lets us critically evaluate these claims as well.

84 Report of Royal Commission, 1875. 85 Evidence of Bibi Zuhoorun, dt. 20 September 1838, in Report Dickens Committee 86 Focault, Discipline and Punish, p.137-‐38


It is often argued that the indentured immigration provided the opportunity to

Indian women to escape from repressive social order of India and economic

independence. Two prominent colonial officials Major Pitcher and George Grierson

believed that emigration would benefit the vulnerable section of female population of

India - widows, single destitute women or women who were abandoned by their

husbands or families by providing an alternative to the oppressive and hostile social

order where the only alternative they had was prostitution. Taking lead from their

arguments, revisionist scholars of indentured Diaspora who have studied its gender

perspectives describe the indentured emigration as a ‘great escape’ or ‘site of

liberation’ where single women choose to emigrate to improve their socio-economic

condition.87 Emmer suggests that indentured emigration was a vehicle for female

emancipation and an escape from a culture which was hostile to single women.88 Brij

Lal argues that ‘migration was not a new or unknown phenomenon for Indian women’

and counts women’s own reasons to leave their homes: to escape from domestic

quarrels, economic hardships, the social stigma attached to young widows and brides

who had brought inadequate dowry, and the general dreariness of rural Indian life’89.

However we have enormous volume of records showing that women were subject to

all kinds of exploitation on plantations and prejudices were at work against them,

often more severely than homeland. They were called low character, were subject to

physical abuse, and were even murdered because of troubled relationships and

jealousy.

The promotion of emigration of women was based more on practical

considerations rather than moral or to liberate them from social repression. Promoting

the emigration of women and family groups became a priority for the Mauritian 87 Emmer, P.C. ‘The Great Escape: The Migration of Female Indentured Servants from British India to Surinam, 1873-‐1961’ in Abolition and its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790-‐1916, edited by D Richardson. London, 1986; Reddock, Rhoda. ‘Freedom Denied: Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, 1845-‐1917’, Economic and Political Weekly, (Special Issue on Review of Women Studies) XX, No. 43 (October 26, 1985); Lal, Brij V., ‘Kunti’s Cry: Indentured Women on Fiji Plantation’, IESHR, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1985; Shepherd, Verene A., ‘Indian Migrant Women and Plantation Labour in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Jamaica: Gender Perspectives’ in Jain, Shobita and Rhoda Reddock (eds.), Women Plantation Workers: International Experience. Oxford: Berg, 1998.

88 Emmer, P.C. ‘The Great Escape’ p. 248 and p. 250. 89 Lal, Brij V. ‘Kunti’s Cry’ p. 57.


administrators in order to encourage the settlement of the Indian emigrants and

therefore secure a readily available settled labour force. ‘…object of regulations to

secure for the colony a permanent rather than a temporary and unsettled

immigration’90. For this purpose they were also very particular about the preferred age

of the women emigrants so they could form conjugal ties and therefore induce the

labourers to settle down. The economic emancipation of women because of wage

earnings does not hold much wait, particularly in case of Indian labour Diaspora in

Mauritius. In 1911 total female population of Indian labour Diaspora in Mauritius was

118,723 out of which 108,332 were listed as ‘without occupation’.91

The moral advancement of labour Diaspora is substantially countered by the

official literature of empire itself. Throughout, the official lexicon was extremely

pejorative towards the immigrant labourers and it was used by the planters to establish

their domination over the labourers.

In the language of command, Indentured labourers were referred as ‘coolies’,

habitual idlers, nuisance, compulsive liars and immoral and were often not even

considered as human beings. Another more disparaging reference was made towards

the women immigrants. They were described as of low character responsible for the

immoral lives and quarrels among the indentured labourers.

Indenture and Capitalist Development (Benefits for the

Empire)

Indenture labour regime was crucial in facilitating the expansion of colonial

capitalist economies by ensuring the uninterrupted supply of labour, cutting the cost

of productions, providing the cash crops need for the industrialisation and

consumption needs and the global process of capital accumulation. A succinct survey

of the indenture labour regime makes it clear that the spatial and ideological

expansion of capitalism under the aegis of imperialism was closely linked and

90 Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP), Vol. xxxv, No. 356, 1844.

91 Census, Mauritius, 1911.


crucially facilitated by the indentured labourers. Indian labourers who arrived to these

plantation settlements under indenture system help the survival of the plantation

economies and at larger levels facilitated the uninterrupted territorial-economic

expansion of the British capitalism. When indentured immigration was suspended for

alleged abuses, Gladstone, a British planter in Guiana and father of future Prime

Minister of Britain, was at the forefront for its resumption. His rationale was not of

benevolence – saving the Indian population from distress but the very benefit of

plantation economy and eventually the empire. He wrote to the Colonial Secretary,

‘We cannot doubt but that Lord Glenelg, as well as the other members of his

Majesty’s Government, will see and admit the great importance of these suggestions

(resumption of emigration from India) to the future preservation and prosperity of not

only British Guiana, but also of most of our other West India colonies.’ 92

Plantations served as the regional economies of the global capitalist economy

of the empire and success of plantation economy was dependent upon critical balance

between abundant land and cheap labour and the supply of cheap labour was ensured

by the arrival of Indian labourers under indentured system. The whole process of

transoceanic emigration of Indian labourers under the indentured labour regime was

situated within the broader context of the expanding political economy of the empire.

It was not fortuitous but strategic and systematic which can be ascertained through a

critical reading of the meticulously crafted system of labour mobilisation and

regulation of their lives as labourers. As Herman Merivale writes;

‘they are not voluntary immigrants in the ordinary sense, led by the

spontaneous desire of bettering their condition… They have been raised, not

without effort, like recruits for the military service93.

The nineteenth century emigration of Indian labourers to British plantation

settlements under the indenture system was part of interconnected capitalist

development under the aegis of imperialism in which labour was commodified and

circulated from the extant reservoirs of cheap labour to the new settlements or to

those regions which were facing labour crisis in the wake of emancipation of slave

92 Gladstone to Glenelg dt 28 Feb 1838. 93 Merivale, Herman, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, Frank Cass, London, 1967

(1861), p.345.


workforce; in order to facilitate the capitalist development of the metropolis or the

empire:

‘indentured labour migration in the 19th century was a part of a larger process

of international circulation of capital and commodities, the ultimate aim of

which was commodity production, under conditions of uneven and combined

capitalist development.94

For Karl Marx, immigrant labourer was ‘the light infantry of industrial capital’

which could be deployed at will to serve the needs of expanding commodity

production. Gay Standing, in his study of migration and modes of exploitation, points

out that ‘by virtue of commoditization under capitalist state, labour became invariably

mobile and migration was necessary for the national and global extension of

capitalism’.95 This process of relocating labour was done in a strategic manner by the

concerned colonial governments through well-structured labour mobilisation

strategies in which labourers were carefully mobilised according to the specific needs

of the labour importing colonies. It was this strategy which was essential for making

of the indentured labour regime and determined the contours of this regime.

Indentured labour regime provided the new basis of economic/territorial

expansion of Capitalism and stimulated a phenomenal upswing in the sugar trade

from the destinations of Indian indentured labourers. It resurrected the dwindling

fortunes of the sugar industry across the regions. Between 1845-48 and 1884 sugar

export from British Guiana increased from 36000 tonnes to 120000 tonnes. For

Trinidad increase was from 19000 tonnes to 64000 tonnes.96 For Fiji which was a late

entrant in the entire process (acquired by British in 1874) exports of sugar doubled

between 1893 and 1914.

The following table illustrates this crucial linkage between the fortunes of

Mauritian sugar economy with the influx of Indian immigrants in no uncertain terms:

Production of Sugar and Arrival of Indian Indentured Labourers in Mauritius

94 Richardson, Peter, Chinese Labour in the Transvaal, London, 1982, p. 3. 95 Standing, Gay, ‘Migration and Modes of Exploitation: Social Origins of Immobility and

Mobility’, JPS, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1981, p. 201. 96 K O Laurence Question of Labour Appendix I


Period Annual average

short tons Sugar

production*

% of total world

production

Arrival of

Indian

emigrants

1835-9 36367 - 25,202

1840-4 37596 3.8 46,815

1845-9 62466 5.0 36,960

1850-4 81588 5.2 68,163

1855-9 133172 6.8 112,636

1860-4 135503 6.8 49,970

Source: Mishra, Amit Kumar, Survivors of Servitude p.87

The movement of labourers not only laid the basis for large scale increase in

tropical production but also played crucial role in creation of infrastructure and

technical advancement in transportation – shipping and port building, roads, railways,

means of communication – all of which were critical prerequisites for accelerating

capitalist development. Contributions of Indian labour Diaspora in capitalist

development is underlined in an undeniable manner by Beaton Patrick in following

passage:

‘Those swarthy orientals, so thinly clad, are the muscles and sinews of

Mauritian body politic. They are the secret source of all the wealth, luxury and

splendour with which the island abounds. There is not a carriage that rolls

along the well macadamised chaussee, or a robe of silk worn by a fair

Mauritian, to the purchase of which the Indian has not, by his labour,

indirectly contributed. It is from the labour of his swarthy body in the cane-


fields that gold is extracted more plenteously than from the diggings of

Ballarat.’ 97

Consequences

Influx of Indian labourers into the plantation settlements across oceans under

indentured labour regime was not remarkably large compared to other global flows of

labour but it had far reaching consequences for those locations. This process of

imperial labour relocation had profound impact on the reshaping of indigenous orders,

societies in many parts of the world, and its institutional and social-cultural legacies

continue to be felt in many ways in many contentious arenas of postcolonial polities

across Asia, Africa and other parts of the world. Indentured labour regime altered the

racial, ethnic, cultural fabric of those locations. I have tried to evaluate the

consequences of the indentured labour regime in two interlinked domains:

Creation of Plural Societies

Labour mobilization and regimentation strategies and the political-moral

archetypes not only labeled various ethnic-racial populations in those locations

according to its own primacies but also segregated them and restrained the spaces of

interactions between these communities. This schema was based on certain

understanding of social-cultural order and norms of behavior of indentured laborers,

entrenched in Victorian notions of race and morality, in which labourers were

construed as tenaciously bound to their ‘origins’ and their acquiescence to the labour

regime and colonial order would depend upon their ability to protect their traditional

conditions.

Such an understanding and scheme hardened the racial stereotypes, divisons

and hostility despite the fact that introduction of Indian immigrant labourers in these

locations exposed them and brought them to contact with others and vice versa. This

created not only the division of labour but also detached them beyond worksite – they

remained aloof to each other in social-cultural realm. Indentured labour regime

created self-contained, isolated worlds on plantations without any interaction and this

not only limited the ways in which these different racial-ethnic segments interacted,

97 Beaton, Patrcik. Creoles and Coolies; or, Five Years in Mauritius. London: James Nisbet, 1858. pp.10-11.


influenced and integrated but also determined the contours of overall social-cultural

and political spaces in these regions. Some scholars have explained this specific

spatial-social arrangement as ‘plural societies’ where different ethnic, social and

cultural segments interact only in marketplace and thus had no cohesiveness.98

Emergence of such exclusive social-cultural and ethnic communities, embeded in

imperial notions of power, race, gender and cultural hegemony had grave implications

for the evolution of these societies, specially through postcolonial transition. Legacy

of such segregation is the myriad events of hostility towards Indian diaspora, conflict

between the communities and extensive exclusion of Indian diaspora in Africa,

Caribbean and Pacific.

Racial casting and use of diverging imageries to underline the intrinsic

differences between the Indian immigrants, the non-white population and the white

population was used by the planters and colonial authorities to prevent the mélange of

different races as this was perceived as a threat to the plantation hierarchy and moral

order of the plantations. Such an attempt made it very difficult for the non-white

populations of Indian and African origins to develop a shared sense of belonging,

cohabitation of space and resources and mutual respect for each other. There were

little common grounds between the African and Indians – cultural prejudices, muted

hostility and contempt determined their relations. Indian settlers used pejorative terms

such as the black population jungali, kafari (infidel) while the blacks found the

Indians as the beasts of burden.

In most of the destinations, Indian indentured labourers were imported as part

of the imperial strategy of undercutting the position of freed African/Creole/Native

laboring populations. This created an innate sense of hostility among those

populations and therefore had its deleterious consequences on the position of Indian

diaspora and their relations with other communities in these places.

In such a sequestering arrangement of social-cultural and economic space,

these disparate segments seem to be held together by the authority of the colonial rule

which was necessary to maintain the order and contain the conflict. Potentials of

hostility between the labouring class which was always endorsed and encouraged by

the planters and colonial authorities got articulated in worst ethnic/racial riots and

98 J S Furnival, Colonial Policy and Practice


clashes among the non-white populations in most of these destinations in 1960s and

70s when the opportunities to acquire the positions of power and authority arose for

these competing communities in the impending withdrawal of the colonial order.

Celebration of Indian Labour Diaspora ?

Following the logic and assertions of ‘imperial liberalism’, scholars of

indenture regime have praised the Indentured labour regime as it provided the

indentured labourers not only unsurpassed economic opportunities and incentives to

industry in the colonies but also permanent release from irksome and oppressive

social customs, caste prejudices and general social degradation which these emigrants

were being subjected to in India. Such advantages were not limited to the indentured

labourers themselves but also ‘provided greater economic gains...and protection to

their descendants.’99 Same appreciation continues in the revisionist scholarship of the

regime which argues that ‘indentured labour system provided the space in which

Indian, itinerant labourers could seek out alternative opportunities for employment on

a global scale.’100

Mauritius is an ideal sight for promulgation of such arguments where a

descendant of an indentured labourer could become the premier of postcolonial nation

state. Revisionist scholars like Marina Carter, Crispin Bates etc emphasise the

transformation of indentured labourers into petty traders, small planters, educated

government employees to celebrate the subaltern agency in which coolie ceased to be

subordinate and created his own world. They argue for celebration of the agency of

indentured labourers rather than reading them through static mould of victimhood

them: ‘we must avoid victimising the victims of unequal labour relations, and

endeavour to establish instead an ‘emic’ perspective on the choices exercised by the

migrants, and to analyse and emphasise the agency and ambitions of the Indian

labourers themselves.’ 101

99 Cumpston, I.M. Indians Overseas in British Territories, 1834-54. London: Dowsons, 1969. p. 162. 100 Bates, Crispin, ‘Courts, ship rolls and letters: reflections of the Indian labour diaspora', in Creating an Archive Today, Toshie Awaya, ed. (Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 21st COE Programme, Centre for Documentation & Area-Transcultural Studies, 2005) p.21. 101 ibid.


Indentured labourers are seen as akin to their European equivalents as

‘opportunity maximising’ who negotiated through the regime and eventually created a

world of their own. They also try to argue for the universality of the regime across the

regions as counterfactual to the emphasis on locational specificities in Asian, African,

and Caribbean destinations of Indian indentured labourers. They find these

differentiations as ‘false distinction’ because the subaltern agency of indentured

labourers worked uniformly across the regions through which the labourers, with the

help of Indian origin intermediaries, merchants, could turned into ‘educated’

government employees and proprietors and could establish themselves as successful

members of the social-economic order of their adopted lands.102

Another facet of celebration of Indian diaspora is their ability to retain their

‘cultrual heritage’ and cultural persistence. This cultural persistence and resiliency of

diasporic indians have been presented as a sign of empowerment of indentured

labourers and benovelence of the imperial regime. However, a closer look at the

segmentation and exclusion in plantation order would explain, and as indicated by

Eric Williams in the context of Caribbean, that such persistence could also be

negative. It may be a sign of exclusion and disempowerment and may lead further

isolation and exclusion.

Celebration of human agency and the phenomenal transformation in the

profile, prestige and power of the Indian indentured diaspora is no doubt

commendable case of victory human aspirations and endeavours over all

circumstantial odds and disabilities. These scholars tend to ignore the complexities

and focusing on linear course without problematizing it. Transformation is not an

outcome of a linear process which can be evaluated through the binaries of

accomplishment or failures. Their argument on uniformity of the course of

transformation across regions is highly ahistorical, and makes sweeping

generalisation with an arrogant ignorance of the intricate details of the trajectories of

transformations in Indian labour diaspora and the course of events in different

locations during last couple of decades. Even if we celebrate the Mauritian case of

successful transformation without problematising it, how could we equate the

102 Bates, Crispin, ‘Courts, ship rolls and letters: reflections of the Indian labour diaspora', in Creating an Archive Today, Toshie Awaya, ed. (Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 21st COE Programme, Centre for Documentation & Area-Transcultural Studies, 2005) p.16


experiences of Indian indentured labourers and course of transformations in their

social-economic status and positioning vis-à-vis other ethnic/ racial groups across the

regions – in Fiji, South Africa, Caribbean and so on. In Fiji Indians were allowed to

acquire land through lease. In last two decades these leases are not renewed and many

of these ‘land owners’ have lost all the property, business and means of living,

creating a kind of painful full circle. In South Africa Indian diaspora continues to be

deprived of equal rights and access to the positions of prominence. In Caribbean too

Indian labourers faced discrimination and alienation on the basis of racial profiling.

Colonial governments placed Indian indentured labourers in difference locations in

different ways depending upon the local circumstances and specific social-cultural-

political order, e.g. Indians were allowed to purchase land in Mauritius while in Fiji

they could only lease the land. Such a differential arrangement of Indians in different

locations had obvious implications for the course of their transformation and it can

not be generalised so vaguely.

The other problematic generalisation is about uniform achievements across all

the sections of the Indian labour diaspora – if all the descendants of indentured

labourers succeeded in becoming small entrepreneurs or government employees what

accounts for the presence of large number of diasporic Indians living in conditions of

desperation and destitute.

Transformations of Labour Regime and the Labourers

There was a strong correlation between the larger changes in the overall

imperial capitalist economy, kismet of sugar plantations, structures of indentured

labour regime and influx as well as positioning of indentured labourers from India. In

this section I will try to trace certain transitions in the indenture labour regime

towards the end of 19th century with a simultaneous effort to trace the labourers in the

labour regime by delineating certain makeovers in their positioning and economic role

in the overall structure of the plantation.

Usual response of the planation economy in times of crisis and sinking

fortunes was to curtail the supply of labour and exploit the existing labour force to

maximise returns. In 1865 when sugar industry in Mauritius faced financial crisis, the

influx of Indian immigrants declined from 20,383 in 1865 to 313 in 1867. Period of


1880s marked the onset of a crisis in the sugar production in British colonies - fall in

sugar prices, challenge by bounty-fed European beet root sugar, and so on. In

response to universal sugar crisis of sugar economy the influx of Indian indentured

labourers in Mauritius declined to 9299 in decade 1881-1890 compared to 37923 in

the preceding decade. Planters in Trinidad however defied this obvious response and

continued their demands for labour primarily to lower the wage rates and put the

labourers under pressure. In the decade of 1871-80 Trinidad received 25147

indentured labourers from India which declined very nominally to 24085 in 1881-90.

However, Trinidad also changed the course of their response gradually towards

consolidation of sugar production by structural changes.

In order to meet the challenges and difficulties in maintaining the large estate

plantations, which were base of the sugar production till now, planters started to

modify of land ownership patterns and restructuring of sugar production by

concentrating on the milling part and passing out the cultivation part to ex-indentured

Indians either though lease of land or selling of small parcels to them. This process,

know as grand morcellement in the history of Mauritius changed certain basics of

agrarian regime like ownership of land and thus the very structure of the plantation

economy from the being one based on absolute ownership of all the components of

the production process to a more technology induced industrial production process

aimed at cost efficiency of the production or at broader levels, transformation of these

plantation colonies from a semi-capitalist plantation economy to an agrarian capitalist

economy.103

This process in Mauritius and similar structural transitions in the labour

regime and plantation economy in other destinations like Trinidad and Fiji laid the

basis of emergence of diasporic Indian peasantry by allowing them to own/lease land.

In 1920, the ex-indentured labourers and their descendants owned 44% of the total

cultivated land in Mauritius.104 In Fiji they also they emerged as the largest planters

of sugarcane but unlike Mauritius, Indian peasants had acquired the land on lease

which has serious implications for their settlement and emergence of a diasporic

community vis-à-vis the native populations in post-colonial Fiji.

103 Virahsawmy, R., Morcellement and the Emergence of Villages in Mauritius, The Case

of Vale and Holyrood, University of Mauritius, Mauritius, 1978. 104 ARPI 1920


Transformation of the labour regime and the labour, overlapped each other as

well in which the wage contract labour could make the leap and transform into

peasant proletariat or petit planteur. It was the restructuring of the sugar economy and

production process, in the wake of challenges of global competition and crisis and

changing requirements, which opened up the possibilities for the indentured labourers

to move beyond the confines of the plantation estates and acquire or lease land for

cultivation which has been refereed as one of the most celebrated transition in the

Indian labour diaspora – from labourers to land owners and a form of liberation of

Indian indentured labourers.105 This newly acquired status of land ownership instilled

agency in the labour diaspora which could now articulate their concerns and demand

for a role in determining the course of relationship between labour and capital, in

whatever covert or naive form it might take. This could be read as the genesis of a

long-term process of reordering the labour relations such that Indian labour diaspora

could eventually rewrite the relations between labour and capital in its own lexicon.

However, it should not be overly romanticised as the absolute independence of the

descendants of the Indian indentured labourers. Despite the ownership of land, the

new class of petit planters was not completely independent of the capitalist class.

Owning to conditions of the plantation economy and lack of economic rationale for

producing any other crop, these petit planters were forced to continue cane cultivation

and depend on the mill owners to buy their cane. Using their superior positioning in

the hierarchy of production process, these mill owners would often determine the

prices as per their profitability rather than the cane growers’ and this made them

economically vulnerable and dependent upon the capitalist class even when they

could make the transition from labours to land owners.

The nature of transition in labour regime and eventually the course of

economy of these plantation colonies was wrapped and retarted by the persistence of

moncrop (sugar) culture and no diversification of economic activities for centuries

limited the opportunities for mobility of the labour by reducing the options as well as

the prospects of the plantation settlements to sustain as a viable economic unit. Royal

Commission of West Indies noted that ‘..clear away the plantation..It hinder the

development, and though sugar is the most valuable crop these places can produce,..it

105 Raj Virahsawmy, ‘A Form of Liberation: From the Camp to the Vilage’, in Uttama Bissoondoyal (ed) Indians Overseas The Mauritian Experience, p.348


is rather too dangerous.. under present circumstances for one to wish to see it remain

in perpetuity.’ 106 This was particularly aggravated by the fact that in most of these

locations, even the public funds were controlled by the plantation lobbies which did

not facilitate the capital investments in other sectors of economy which remained

under capitalised. Such an overdependence of economic order continues to haunt

these settlements till date. Mauritius finds it difficult when the preferential trade of

sugar agreement, which it secured with Britain immediately after independence, has

been abolished leading to serious challenges for development planners. How to

diversify from and come out of an overarching economic activity which had been

dominating/ dictating every part of the economic-social-cultural lives of people and

sustain the general development of the country and well being of the people is the

most imminent challenge for the most of the locations having this specific plantation

past.

India’s Uneven Integration

Indenture labour regime was an outcome of imperatives of racialised global

division of labour and uneven integration of India in the capitalist world economy

under imperial reign. Planters’ post-emancipation search for the new labour drew

their attention towards India and in the process of exporting Indian labourers to work

as indentured labourers in these plantation settlements, India was gradually being

integrated into the capitalist work economy as a supplier of labour, the most

vulnerable component in the capitalist enterprise of that order and time. In this

process of colonial intervention and integration, massive disruption of Indian

economy, means of livelihood, famines, demise of traditional industries, payments for

ever increasing rents, all these factors led to eviction of the labour from villages and

loss of employment for them. This long term economic distress, primarily a

consequence of colonial intervention in the indigenous production system and rural

economy of India, created conditions for a higher degree of occupational and

geographic mobility, declines in occupational status and a pronounced drift in to

general labouring of Indian people. Decline of traditional industries and

manufacturing like weaving was caused by various methods of regressive taxation

including unfair countervailing duties and which promoted the penetration of machine

106 cited in Adamson p.256


made cheaper products into the village communities. 107 This rampant

deindustrialization created a massive unemployed workforce which had no other

means of subsistence but to emigrate to locations outside India. In eastern districts of

North Western Provinces, (later United Provinces) ‘the weavers had taken themselves

to agriculture or other labour, to menial services, emigration to Mauritius, and even

elsewhere and even to begging’.108 Similar was the fate of weavers from South where

having lost their means of livelihood, weavers were going to Bourbon and Mauritius

in large numbers.109

This ‘creative destruction’ of indegenous economy, as part of the civilising

mission, created the push for disposed who were actually suspended between a

shrinking subsistence economy and a yet to evolve free labour market. This displaced

population was vulnerable because of the fluctuations of economic factors and

migration was an obvious subsistence strategy for them and they fell prey in the hands

of recruiters who were looking for people to send them to plantation settlements

across oceans. The ever increasing demand for the Indian labourers to serve under

indenture regime soon crossed this readily available stock and recruiters began to

intrude the villages to lure more and more people to emigrate. Such large scale

mobilisation of Indian labourers and disposed peasantry an effective labour shortage

for the agricultural/ economic activities in the localities and later for the plantations

like that in Assam.

107 ‘They (mills of Paisley and Manchester) were created by the sacrifice of the Indian

manufacturers. British goods were forced upon her without paying any duty, and the foreign manufacture employed the arm of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor.’ Desai,A.R. Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1976. p. 82.

108 Indian Revenue Proceedings, No. 22, June 1864, cited in Saha, Emigration of Indian Labour. p. 59.

109 Collector of Godavari district to Board of Revenue. dt. 14 April 1834


Concluding observations from the Perspectives of Global

History

In this paper I have tried to present an overview of the indentured labour regime,

under which Indian labourers were mobilised to work on sugar plantations across the

Caribbean, Indian and Pacific Ocean regions, in order to reflect upon certain essential

pointers for the study of a agrarian labour regime in terms of formation, functioning

and transformations from perspectives of global history and to draw the big picture by

situating these into the overall political-economic order of the times. By exploring the

essentials of indentured labour regime and the work, and life histories of indentured

labourers, my attempt here was to offer some fresh analysis of existing discourse of

the symbiotic relations between the local and global and to situate those indentured

labourers as a mainstay of the studies of labour regime.

1. Such an overall study of the indentured labour regime from larger perspectives

of plantation economies is necessary as it provides critical insights into

understanding of imperial control, circulation of goods and labour across

territorial limits, commodification of labour and the connections between the

colonies and metropolis, as well as between colonies. In order to understand

the intricacies of the indenture system we have to carefully unfold the

rationale behind the setting up of the system because this rationale is the most

critical determinant of the contours of labour regime. The intrinsic logic of the

indenture labour regime was not the ‘civilisation mission’ as argued often by

the capitalists and colonisers of that time but to ensure the availability of

labour in terms and conditions conducive to the plantation economy and

device ways to utilise them in most productive manner.

2. The procedure of locating local in global and vice versa here depended upon

‘historical, structural and spatial’ configurations of specific taxonomies and

relations of authority/subordination. Indentured labourers were subordinated

within the confines of plantations at multiple levels of race, class, gender etc


and these taxonomies were created and sustained by the undercurrents of

capitalist world economy as well as concerns and wants of the metropolis.

Indentured labourers were constricted in the confines of plantations with

several statutory restrains on their territorial as well as social-political and

economic mobility yet their lives were not insulated from the larger landscape

of global events. A closer look into the lives of indentured labourers and the

dynamic of indentured regime shows how global political economic

transformations and world market processes impress upon the production

process, labour relations and labourers’ lives in ‘localities’.

3. Indentured labour regime could commodify the labour but it could not

establish a free labour market with symmetrical relationship between the

labour and capital. It continued to be governed by the imperial-racial

hierarchies and unevenness of class relations according to racial prejudices

which severely curtailed the labourers’ ability to negotiate for their labour as

they could do in a free market. (though there could be no ideal free market

ever) The discourse of labour regime was determined by the incongruity of

economic rationality and noblesse oblige of the system. Labour regime had to

be not only economically viable but also fulfil the obligations of benevolent

empire towards the improvement of colonised subjects, and this resulted in an

inherent contradiction reflected in every domain of the system, making it a

historically distinct agrarian labour regime. A careful investigation of severity

of indeture obligations, Master and Servants laws, several sestrictions on the

mobility of labour, absence of alternatives ensured that indentured labourers

had less ability and rights to negotiate than a ‘free wage labour’ even these

labourers earned wages at a stipulated rates and suppose to have entered in the

indenture through their own free will.

4. Sourcing of plantation labourers through indenture system in post

emancipation era conform to the very idea of dynamic in the labour regimes.

As preceding narrative in this paper shows, there were arrays of dynamic

transformations within the indentured labour regime as well in making,

managing and make over of this regime. However, two critical determinants of

the labour regime – servitude and subalternity of labourers continued in the


indentured labour regime albeit certain adaptations to realise the changing

requirements of the capitalist production process and mollify the political-

moral archetypes of the colonial authorities. A careful reading of the

functioning of the indentured labour regime does not confirm to the

aspirations of anti slavery enthusiasts that emancipation would establish a free

labour regime. Despite the carefully elaborated labour laws and application of

liberal ideas of trusteeship and benevolence to protect the labour from the

plantocracy, the practical decision making remained in their hands, though the

mode by which this group applied its sanctions changed during transition from

slavery to indenture – mediated, indirect, and depersonalised form of

administration replace the naked, direct and open force which was

characteristic of slavery.110 Concentration of political authority reinforced the

concentration of economic power on the sugar estates and reflected in the rigid

structures of hierarchy, stratification and control in the labour regime.

5. Indentured labour regime functiones as a critical conduit between emerging

liberal ideas, social theories and imperatives of capitalst imperial government

in 19th C. Nature of labour regime, extent of freedom for labourers and their

volition to be masters of their own work and time depended upon and

determined by the priorities and penchants of the plantation economy and

capitalist intent of the metropolis. Indentured labourers were underpaid and

denied the rights to seek new employer for employment implying that their

position and agency as ‘free labourers’ was restricted and conditioned by the

indentures or contracts they had entered into. The language of command

continued to be filled with racial prejudices and these imperial allegories and

racial dogmas continued to determine the discourse of discipline and authority

in the indentured labour regime. Despite the claims of increased responsibility

and benevolence by the colonial state, the post emancipation indentured labour

regime in plantation colonies survived and continued as an entity both in

punishment and resistance and as a labour regime it hinged upon compulsory

nature of contract and penal sanctions for the violations of contractual

obligations. ‘Although it began in the anxiety of the colonial state to distance

110 Alan Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves, p.12


indenture from slavery and to restrain the planters’ private authority, by the

end of 19th C the indenture laws had acquired their own raison d’etre, an over

elaborate machinery that churned out what it was supposed to eradicate.’ This

reminds us to the cliché that ‘everything must change so that everything

remain the same’ to define the indenture labour regime. Indentured labour

regime provided the labourers to escape certain social-economic subjugations

at home as it has been often argued, but a comprehensive analysis of the

labour regulation under the indentured regime makes it clear that they were

simultaneously drawn into a more ruthless structure of moral and physical

domination, this time transbroder. As Madhavi Kale puts it

‘The imperial labour relocation strategy characteristically and

contradictorily made good the promise of imperial liberalism to release

people from the fixities of place, custom, and birth into mobility and

the opportunity to rise above their “traditional” station – into other

orders of imperial hierarchy.’111

6. Transborder mobility of Indian labourers under Indentured labour regime

integrated spaces and bodies in the ambit of post-enlightenment Western

liberalism but the primacy of capitalist intents and ensued power structures

precluded the necessary horizontal integration of the labour diaspora.

Indentured labour from colonized spaces were embraced within the circuits of

global circulation but positioned in enduring state of subordination. Certain

racial connotations, often packaged as civilizational differences, were

embedded in the regulation of indentured labour regime to facilitate and

legitimize subordination and exclusion of the indentured labour. Contours of

integration of indentured labourers in global landscape of capitalism were

determined by the political subjugation, economic supremacy and

accumulation by dispossession. With the abolition of slavery institutions

which had segregated people and created hierarchies based on race did not

disappear but merely their lexicon and expressions changed. A closer look into

the intricacies of functioning of the indentured labour regime would divulge

111 Kale, Madhavi, Fragments of Empire: Capitalism, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean, Uni of Penn Press, Philadelphia, 1998, p. 175. emphasis added.


that biological racism and racial taxonomies acquired a new salience in this

post emancipation labour regime. This remains a blemish in applauds for

humanitarian concerns of post-emancipation British liberalism and will

continue to contest the imageries of imperial benevolence, noblesse oblige and

portrayal of indentured labourers as ‘beneficiaries of empire’.

7. Study the Indenture labour regime by situating it within the discourse of

global history enables us to understand the course of postcolonial

transitions from a fresh perspective, in a more broader comprehensive

context than merely binary optics of empire/nation and nation/diaspora.