Mishra - Indentured Indian Labor

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
amitmishra@fas.harvard.edu
Assistant Professor
Centre for Study of Indian Diaspora
University of Hyderabad
Hyderabad (India)
amit@uohyd.ac.in
Draft Paper on work in progress. Please do not cite.
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 Colonisers 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
WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 1
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 theoreticalanalytic 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 powersthe 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 centurylarge-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
8
Wolf (1982: 355)

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

West Indian Association to Russell dt 17 December 1839 PP HCNo xxiii, 1840.
10
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

PP HC No xxiii, 1840
13
Mandle, Jay R. The Plantation Economy pp.20-24.
12
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 nonproductive 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 labourers 14 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 havent 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 Lincolns 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 hatch23 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, depeasantisation, 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: Peoples 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
Look Lai p127
35
Report of Royal Commission Mauritius 1875
34
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

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

Brij Diaspora p.176
41
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
46
Grierson Report
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.
Out2lows of Indian Indentured Labour
% of total immigration
120
100
0
6.5
0
33.4
80
12.9
0.5
11.4
58.6
62.5
60
40
6.6
0
32.7
71
93.5
20
South and East Africa
6.9
66.6
30.6
29.6
14.7
4.7
Others
51.3
Fiji
Caribbean
Indian Ocean Islands
Years
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.
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 vicious54 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
kidnapping55. 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,

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.
55
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 expectation60
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
1848
57
1873
47
1881
5 7.42
1892
5 7.5
1898
4.54 5.44
1909
1915
56

59
60
Proposal of Free Labour Association of Mauritius, PP, Vol. xxxx, No.26, 1842.
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 reindenturing 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
62
63
Report of T. Hugon, dt 29 July, 1839, PP, Vol. xxxvii, No. 331, 1840; DWD Commins, Note
on Emigration from India to Trinidad, 1893.
Report of R. Mitchell, dt. 21 July, 1874, cited in Tinker, Hugh, A New System of Slavery,
p.189.
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
65
66
67
68
Labour laws of 1878 tried to impose some strictures for the judicious use of double cut by
making the assent of Stipendiary Magistrates mandatory.
Report of Sanderson Committee, 1910, Pt. III.
Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 189. Tinker mentions 1909 as the end of double cut.
Gomm to Stanley, dt. 27 February 1843, CO/ 167/ 245, PRO; PP, Vol. xxvii, No. 168,
1846; Report of Royal Commission, 1875, p. 297.
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 pretextwhether 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
ARPI 1861-872
73
Case of Ramluckan, Appended to the Petition of Adolphe de Plevitz, dt. 4 June 1871, CO
167/536.
72
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. Antivagrancy 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.
3435.
75
76
Report of Royal Commission

Geoghegan Report pp 67-68
consciousness77 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 others 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 Lindens 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
labours 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 techniqueindentured 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 Brownes 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. 68, 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 sicknesswhen 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 slaveryAfricans 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 useful86 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 womens 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 life89.
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.,
Kuntis 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. Kuntis 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
immigration90. 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
Majestys 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
93
Gladstone to Glenelg dt 28 Feb 1838.

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
95
96
Richardson, Peter, Chinese Labour in the Transvaal, London, 1982, p. 3.

Standing, Gay, Migration and Modes of Exploitation: Social Origins of Immobility and
Mobility, JPS, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1981, p. 201.
K O Laurence Question of Labour Appendix I
Period
Annual average
% of total world
Arrival of
short tons Sugar
production
Indian
production*
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 mlange 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--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-culturalpolitical 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--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.
Indias 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 politicalmoral 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 detre, an over
elaborate machinery that churned out what it was supposed to eradicate. This
reminds us to the clich 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.


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Indentured Indian Labour Regimes: Situating

Peripheral Labour in Global Historical Context

Dr Amit Kumar MISHRA

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

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 1

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 2

Premise of Global History

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

Need for the New Labour

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 5

Wolf (1982: 355)

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 6

Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 p.194

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 7

emancipated populations as labourers because of high wages and uncertainty of

Alan Admason p.6

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 8

experimenting unsuccessfully with Chinese and African indentured labour schemes,

Indian Indentured Labour Regime

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 9

settlements like Mauritius, Trinidad, Fiji, Guiana, etc. as contract labourers 14 is

1. Imperial Liberalism and Noblesse Oblige: Ideological Debates and

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

There was another stream of immigration of Indian labourers to work on plantations in

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 10

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

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 12

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 13

This rampant deindustrialization created a massive

unemployed workforce which had no other means of subsistence but to emigrate to

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 16

Articulation and assertion of racial differences between the communities was

Munasinghe Callaloo p.76

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 17

Planters with collaboration of colonial

administration, succeeded in systematic domination discipline and control of labour

Thomas Halt: The Problem of Freedom, p.38

P C Emmer : Importation of British Indians in Suriname p. 107

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.

Report of Sanderson Committee, 1910 p.27:568

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 19

between April and July 1872. Geoghegan Report, p. 68.

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

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

Out2lows of Indian Indentured Labour

South and East Africa

Indian Ocean Islands

3.3. Labour Mobilisation

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 22

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 23

3.4. Wage Payments

PP, Vol. xxxv, No. 530, 1844,

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 24

Average Monthly Wages (Rupees/

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 25

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 26

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

3.5. Freedom of Mobility

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 27

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

WIGH Seminar Draft Amit Mishra/ 28