Introduction
The key intermediary in labour recruitment across regions and industries in northern India was the sardar, a figure of much debate in Indian labour historiography. In the nineteenth century, the sardar (or the jobber) was ubiquitous. For example, in jute and cotton factories his position was somewhat structured, but in occupations such as carting, construction or rickshaw-pulling, where employment was almost entirely on a casual basis, he played multiple roles. In a few cases, as in the Bombay textile mills, women were supervised by sardarnis or women sardars. Meaning, literally, ‘leader’, the term had indigenous pre-colonial roots, used to denote village elders and gang-leaders as well as labour supervisors. Labour historians have argued that the term became more closely associated with labour recruitment and management in the context of colonial capitalist enterprises. R.S. Chandavarkar's writings have advanced our understanding of the critical role played by the sardar, not only in recruitment, where the earlier historians’ emphasis lay, but also in labour control and supervision. He has convincingly argued against treating the sardar (or jobber) either as employers’ agents or as labour representatives: such intermediaries walked a tightrope, requiring the trust of employers to maintain their privileges, while consolidating their control by extending patronage to workers.Footnote 1 According to Chandavarkar, the sardars’ power within the workplace was a dynamic complex of their command over recruitment and their general disciplining and supervisory roles.
In most industries, mills and mines as well as in carting, rickshaw-pulling, construction and other urban occupations, employment was casual and recruitment informal. The major exception in this regard was the plantation industry. Beginning with the recruitment for overseas plantations and followed by Assam tea plantations, there grew a formal and structured process of labour recruitment, organized under corporate agencies, governed by contract and subject to state regulation. What role did the sardar play in such exceptional recruitment regimes? The case of the Assam tea plantations is of particular interest in this regard because of the rather unique way in which the industry reworked the sardari system. In the Assam system, recruitment was separated from control and supervision of production, the two functions being performed, usually, by separate sets of sardars, though there could be some overlap between the two groups. This separation of functions was a response to the difficulties of mobilizing labour and the need felt by planters to develop multiple systems of recruitment.
Discussions about the desirability of sardari recruitment started in the 1860s. In the late-nineteenth century the sardars deployed for recruitment, often termed the ‘garden sardar’, came under intense scrutiny, becoming the focus of official and public debate as well as repeated state regulation. The debate covered a wide ground, impacting on the whole question of Assam recruitment for nearly a century. The role and position of the garden sardar was constructed in opposition to the professional contractors, who were the earliest players in the game of plantation recruitment. The distinction drawn between these two kinds of labour-brokers was two-fold: first, the sardar was considered an informal intermediary and thus exempt from many of the onerous regulations imposed on the professional contractors, and second, the sardar was perceived to be an ‘insider’ recruiting within a proximate community and thus less likely to use force and deception in recruitment. The sardar was presented as a non-market agent, recruiting among ‘friends and relatives’, using existing networks of caste, kin and village relationships, and the contractor, as a commercial agent, who traded in labour for profit, thereby approximating ‘traffic’ in persons as in the case of slavery.Footnote 2 The story of the Assam system is one of commercialization and formalization of recruitment, in the dual sense of increasingly elaborate state regulation and corporate recruiting, culminating in the formation of the Tea Districts Labour Supply Association. Such formalization, however, went hand-in-hand with a constant emphasis on informal modes as being more ethical and desirable. Informal recruitment was encapsulated in the figure of the garden sardar. This paper examines the ways in which perceptions of informality informed the functioning of sardari and, moreover, demonstrates how ephemeral were these various distinctions drawn in official and plantocratic discourses. Despite state and capitalist efforts to create, continually redefine and sustain the separation between contractor and sardari recruitment, there developed a close nexus between the two. Throughout the entire period of Assam recruitment, there were wide overlaps between sardars and contractors’ agents.
The first section in this paper describes the introduction of the garden sardar and analyses some of the debates associated with sardari in the early years. The second section examines the impact of the Act of 1882, to show how professional contractors worked in tandem with sardars to defeat some of the purposes of informalisation. The third section focuses on a case of recruitment of a woman, to show how misplaced were the expectations from sardars as ‘insider’ agents. Sardars were able, as insiders, sometimes to better exploit vulnerabilities within their communities to practice fraudulent recruitment. The dichotomy posited between commercial and communitarian approaches to recruitment was to prove unsustainable.
Introducing the sardar in Assam plantation recruitment
An acute shortage of workers prompted a distinctive labour system in Assam tea plantations, based on expensive importation and long-term contracts. Kaushik Ghosh argued that the labour shortage was more perceived than real, resulting from planters’ unwillingness to employ local workers, who demanded not only higher wages but also exercised some day-to-day control over the period and intensity of their labour.Footnote 3 The industry grew dependant on long-distance migrants and this was to become the justification for introducing a draconian contract system. Importing labour was an expensive business, so planters demanded substantial control to offset costs asking for the extension of the Workmen's Breach of Contract Act of 1859. The colonial state obliged. The notorious contract system came to define Assam tea plantations and remained its cornerstone until the 1920s.
The labour question emerged as critical from the very inception of the industry in the 1830s. When attempts to mobilize local labour failed under terms the planters desired, there were experiments with immigrant Chinese labour, at first imported from China, and then from Calcutta. Both proved unviable. By the 1850s, when the industry was beginning to find its feet, planters decided that the only solution was labour from Bengal. Fetching labour from Bengal was expensive but this was not the only issue. Assam tea plantations recruited workers in thousands, mobilization on a scale new in the Bengal countryside. According to one estimate, about 750,000 workers were brought to the Assam tea plantations between 1860 and 1900.Footnote 4 The only comparable example was recruitment for overseas colonies, which had begun in the 1830s, developing networks and institutions geared towards large-scale recruitment, negotiation of contracts and transportation arrangements. Notably, much of this early recruitment was also for plantations, mainly sugar plantations in the West Indies, Mauritius and a few other British and French colonies. In the early years, Assam recruiters related most closely to and competed with Mauritius agents. Both employers utilized contractors and agencies, which developed into a complex network of commercial recruitment. This was the dominant mode of labour mobilization in the 1860s.
Planters complained against the expense of commercial recruitment, the state acknowledged its huge social and human costs, but while the tea plantations expanded they required a large and constant supply of labour. Professional recruiters alone were able to satisfy these demands. Another parallel system, however, had begun to emerge—the sardari system. This entailed plantations sending selected workers back to their ‘native lands’, such as Bengal, Bihar and eastern United Provinces, to persuade others to join them in plantation work. This system was placed on a formal footing by enactment of a new law in 1870.
Much of the strains and pulls between the contractor and the sardar were played out in successive legislation intended to regulate Assam plantation labour. The Act of 1859 was at the core of the contract system and at the heart of the recruitment system, since it made expensive labour affordable, allowing planters to pass the costs of recruitment on to the workers. Another parallel system of contracts was introduced by a series of protective legislation to reduce the incidence of mortality en route to Assam and to eliminate fraud and misrepresentation in the process of recruitment. The first such Act was passed in 1863, introducing the provision of registering recruits prior to placing them under contract and transporting them to Assam. This rudimentary regulation was inadequate to address the mounting abuses of recruitment. New legislation in 1870 sought to modify the arrangements introduced in 1863, which had been amended in 1868. The Act of 1870 abolished the ‘minimum wage’ introduced by the previous Act and created the ‘Garden Sardar’, divided into licensed (to recruit more than 20 workers and subjected to the same rules as contractors) and unlicensed (who operated without any restriction). In 1873, a new Act allowed, at the behest of the planters, ‘free labour’, but failed to please them. The Act allowed unlicensed recruitment subject to a civil contract, which would be valid for only one year. But Assam planters wanted ‘free emigration’, not ‘free labour’, and made no use of this Act.Footnote 5
By the time the sardar acquired a definite identity in law, professional contractors had established a stranglehold over Assam recruitment. They developed elaborate networks employing different levels of sub-contractors right up to the village. The notorious arkati was at the lowest end of this chain. The arkati became the target of allegations of fraud and coercion, but irregularities were endemic in the system, encouraged by the high levels of profit, leading, eventually, to criminalization. It was not the irregularities of recruitment, but another set of factors that turned planters against the contractors. First, the contractors took advantage of licensing and expansion in the industry to drive up the price of labour, which rose to between Rs 120 and Rs 150 per worker, an extra-ordinarily high amount in the late-nineteenth century.Footnote 6 Second, planters hoodwinked ‘selecting agents’ appointed in Calcutta by Tea Companies and sent up ‘unsuitable’ workers. Planters complained that contractors routinely misdescribed recruits,
The Deputy Commissioner of Cacher:
I imagine that comparatively few men described in the garden returns as Chota Nagpur come from that part of India at all. In one case I met a contractor, who was very indignant because a batch of Azimgarh coolies had been returned on his hands as not being junglies. I objected that they were not as a matter of fact junglies to which he coolly replied that they were as good junglies as a man could expect to find at Rs.45 a head.Footnote 7
A Deputy Commissioner reported a case of contractors trying to pass off recruits from Azamgarh as ‘junglies’ (the term usually given to describe adivasi workers from Chota Nagpur) and when caught, they insisted that such ‘were as good junglies as a man could expect to find at Rs 45 a head.’Footnote 8 Third, contractors’ recruits were less able to adapt to Assam climate and their deceptions were considered the primary factor behind high mortality in the gardens. Fourth, the intense competition for labour among gardens led to an obsession with ‘enticement’ within the economy of the Assam gardens. Labourers sent up by professional recruiters had no particular bond to a specific garden and would, if they could, abscond from their contracts if offered better conditions in another garden.
On all these counts, planters believed the garden sardar to be a superior option. The idea was that plantations would send workers they could trust to their villages and these sardars would recruit from their immediate neighbourhood and among their kin, caste and community. The sardar was paid all his expenses and a small commission for each worker he recruited. If they were able to bring large numbers of recruits (more than 20) they had to be certified by the garden, otherwise they could operate without any of the surveillance to which professional contractors were subject. The sardar was cheaper and his workers more likely to be ‘suitable’ since they were from a similar background. Sardari coolies were less prone to absconding, because of kin and community affiliation among new immigrants, the preponderance of married couples and a smaller number of solitary men and women, agreed inspecting officers in Assam.Footnote 9 Thus, social ties to the garden to which they were initially recruited literally grounded ‘sardari coolies’. However, in one respect the garden sardar was no match for the contractor: in this phase of expansion when the labour needs of each plantation ran into thousands, and new plantations were being set up every year, the sardar's batch of twenty or less became inadequate. Thus the contractor could not be dispensed with. Nevertheless, from the 1870s, with the demand for ‘free emigration’, and the most intense debates about the Assam system, the sardar became a counterpoint, a solution to various recruitment problems.
The garden sardar was not only unable to deliver on numbers, but was repeatedly drawn into the commercial net of the professionals. The assumption that sardars would remain within the limited sphere of their own personal networks was anchored in a conviction about the ‘closed’ nature of rural society, a conviction that shaped strategies of capital and policies of the colonial state. In this sense, Assam recruitment was a ground for wider debates between the labour needs of colonial capital, legitimate means of mobilizing such labour and its social cost in the countryside. These debates remain largely unexplored by historians. By and large, scholars of migration have uncritically reproduced colonial stereotypes of the inherently immobile nature of Indian labour. For some scholars this explains laggard capitalist development;Footnote 10 for others, the extraordinary scale of migration in the nineteenth century is testimony of colonial depredation of the peasant economy.Footnote 11 A recent intervention argues a case for ‘choice’, an examination of who migrated and for what reason.Footnote 12
Migration studies have not appreciated fully the extent to which colonial discourse of labour was shaped by the ideas of a static, self-sufficient and harmonious village community. Such assumptions led officials as well as entrepreneurs to assume that recruitment required special and directed effort, either by force or by economic incentive, both incompatible with the primary aim of cheap labour.Footnote 13 Caught in a contradiction of their own making, they struggled over recruitment strategies that usually created more problems than they solved. The sardar was at the heart of this conundrum. They were a solution in that they were the ‘native’ agents who facilitated the difficult business of mobilizing labour, and each industry, given the specificity of its situation, depended on sardars to varying degrees. They were also a problem, because as critical intermediaries they shared and could undermine employers’ control over labour. Believing themselves dependent on the sardar, colonial capitalists ‘grew increasingly resentful of the extent to which they had been cut out of their own systems of labour control and recruitment’ and ‘colonial discourse, adopting the high moral ground, came to focus upon the abuses and evils of the jobber system’, writes Rajnarayan Chandavarkar.Footnote 14 In the factory industry, the focus of Chandavarkar's study, the sardar emerged as a key intermediary, of whom employers ‘grew increasingly resentful’ and who they eventually sought to undermine with formal mechanisms of control and recruitment. Their efforts proved largely unsuccessful, informal intermediation remaining an abiding feature in Indian industries, even to this day. The ‘garden sardars’ in the Assam plantations were substantially different. There being a separate set of sardars entrusted with supervision of day-to-day work, garden sardars there were typically recruiters. Moreover, they were not the main source of labour supply. Since the primary agency of recruitment remained with the commercial contractors, growing increasingly powerful as an interest group and dictating the price of labour, the garden sardars were valued as a means of opening the field to small players. They were often styled as the employers’ agent, and were deployed to subvert contracting interests. The garden sardar had a crucial but limited function, to cheapen recruitment. Even so, maintaining the limits and benefits of the operation of garden sardars proved nearly impossible.
The garden sardar, therefore, closed the circular logic of colonial discourse on labour, posing a set of intractable contradictions. His role was premised on the ‘traditional’ character of rural society, presumed to be organised through the village community and the caste system. Sent down from the garden to his ‘own village’ to recruit among his kinfolk, caste-fellows and village neighbours, he was valued as an ‘insider’, enjoying special status and privilege within the closed world of kin, caste and village. It was assumed that the self-sufficient, mutually connected and interdependent village society, resistant to the market, would be more susceptible to insider penetration. The assumption that sardars would remain within the limited sphere of their own personal networks, grounded in convictions about the ‘closed’ nature of rural society, was, however, challenged by mounting evidence from the chief recruiting areas. It became increasingly clear, towards the close of the nineteenth century, that the garden sardar was not effective as a corrective for the professional contractors, who had already proved the efficiency of commercial mobilization. Clearly, since contractors were able to ship thousands of workers to Assam, what was at issue was not so much the capacity of market penetration to loosen workers from the land but an excess of commercialized labour mobilization, over which neither the planters nor the state was able to establish effective control. The garden sardar was expected to mobilize labour not sufficiently responsive to market incentive and at the same time contain the evils of excessive commercialization. Inhabiting these contradictory domains, the garden sardar became the focus of debates over alternative forms of recruitment—market incentives versus direct recruitment, free versus indentured labour.
The discussion around the garden sardar elaborated assumptions regarding the role of the family, commercial recruitment and the state in labour mobilization. The role of the family and traditional institutions of caste, village and community came under more intense scrutiny in respect of women's recruitment. Tea plantations were exceptional in northern India, in that they employed an equal proportion of men and women and gave especial importance to importing women, for both productive and reproductive purposes.Footnote 15
The debate over women's recruitment was complemented, from the 1890s, by condemnation of ‘tribals’ being exploited by recruiters. Assam planters focused closely on recruitment of the so-called tribals and on ‘family migration’, a combined strategy to facilitate recruitment, settlement, reproduction and production. They had begun to recruit heavily among tribals or the adivasis Footnote 16 of Santhal Parganas first, moved rapidly into Chota Nagpur and then into Chhatisgarh (Central Provinces)—communities where they believed family migration was more established and where they sought workers ‘suitable’ for the Assam climate and plantations’ ‘agricultural work’.Footnote 17
These groups—women and tribals—were depicted as helpless and ignorant, and easily deceived by unscrupulous recruiters. In the case of tribals, the colonial state's policy of isolation complicated the debate between the relative merits of sardars and contractors, insiders and outsiders. Critics, who condemned Assam recruitment, alleging kidnapping and enticement of the weak and vulnerable by recruiters, argued that sardars could not be separated from commercial recruitment. But the conviction that sardars were more suited to recruit within the ‘closed’ rural, especially tribal, society rendered them a blind spot in colonial policy. As a result, many of the abuses of Assam recruitment resisted legislative solution, returning repeatedly through doors left open to garden sardars.Footnote 18
From the mid-1870s, regulation of recruitment led to a series of controversies, which brought into play contradictory interests within various agencies of colonial administration. Assam government successfully lobbied the Government of India on behalf of tea interests. Government of Bengal, persuaded by competitors for labour in its own province, fought for restrictions on Assam recruitment. The state promoted the garden sardar on the grounds of redressing ‘abuses’ of recruitment, an argument couched in the language of protection. Moreover, subordinate bureaucracy was in an ambiguous relationship with recruiters, both in collusion and in conflict. Local state functionaries sought to establish control over recruiters; some of them entered into a range of informal, often corrupt, negotiations with the more lucrative professional recruitment outfits; and some aligned themselves with other commercial interests opposed to or in competition with Assam recruiters. This last group was one of the sternest and most effective critics of the Assam system, leading the campaign for successive reforms at the turn of the century. Meanwhile policy at the higher levels of imperial government undermined their efforts by retaining informal and unregulated recruiters, like the sardars. This ambiguous role of the state—facilitating needs of capital, on the one hand, and a source of protective labour legislation, on the other, was an enduring issue in colonial India. And these contradictions were in full play over the sardar problem—showing the fault lines within different levels and agencies of the state.
Free Emigration and the Garden Sardar
During 1875 and 1876, professional labour contractors expanded operations. Several licensed labour depots were established in the suburbs of Calcutta, in Sealdah and Entally, within easy distance of the Eastern Bengal Railways, through which the emigrants were sent on to Goalundo or Koosthea, thence by river to Assam. J.G.G. Grant, Superintendent of Emigration, deplored the proliferation of private labour depots, but admitted that with the increase in scale of emigration this was inevitable. The introduction of ‘Garden Sardars’ did not cut into the contractors’ business. Contractors alone were able to supply workers quickly and in large numbers, and sardars required their experienced assistance as forwarding agents, unable on their own to convey large numbers of recruits.Footnote 19
Analysing mortality statistics during the journey, as well as the numbers of coolies ‘rejected’ prior to embarking on the river journey, Grant concluded that there was no major difference between sardari and contractor recruits. He argued in favour of greater supervision over all emigration. While sardari recruitment was probably ‘more honestly conducted’, he argued that sardars ‘have no more personal interest in the welfare of those whom they are paid to recruit than the contractors’ and indeed, since they were less supervised, their recruits had less chance of being ‘undeceived or emancipated from their engagements at any stage of their journey’ much less be offered ‘proper care and comfort’, given that the sardars were tempted into false economy during the journey, which placed the health and safety of their workers at risk.Footnote 20
The creation of the Chief Commissioner's Province of Assam in 1874 was a boost for the planters. On their representation, the Government of India passed a new Act in 1882 to facilitate migration to Assam gardens. This Act swept aside the rudimentary protective mechanism which had been built up by Bengal government over the previous 20 years. The Government of India agreed with the planters that all abuses relating to emigration were due to ‘professional contractors and recruiters, and . . . the only way to put inter-provincial emigration on a sound and natural basis, and . . . to diminish the cost of procuring labour’ was to discourage professional recruiters.Footnote 21 A double strategy was adopted. First, the garden sardars were to be promoted at the cost of the contractors, the aim being ‘to sever all connection between garden sardars and contractors’ depots, and to give the widest scope to . . . the sardari system.’Footnote 22 Despite Grant's evidence, planters insisted that garden sardars drew labour from their local area from kin and neighbourhood networks, and this minimised the risk of deception and coercion in the recruitment process. Also, of course, the sardar's commission was far lower.
The second prong of the strategy became the major innovation of Act I of 1882—the introduction of ‘free emigration’. The planters wished to open up the possibility of direct emigration without the agency of recruiters, and, more importantly, as communications eased, they were eager to loosen government restrictions. The failure of the 1873 Act had clearly demonstrated the planters’ hostility to ‘free labour’, so the new ‘free emigration’ was allowed in parallel with the existing contractual regime. The Government of India sought to represent this new system as ‘free labour’,Footnote 23 glossing over the fact that the 1873 provision for ‘free’ labour had failed because it was ‘too free’. Assam planters were not ready to abandon the penal contract. The halfway house of unregulated recruitment for contractual employment had the desired result of opening the field to a variety of recruiters. This meant more competition for the sardar too.
Following the Act of 1882, planters organized recruitment under a new network of ‘Local Agents’ in order to coordinate garden sardars as well as organize ‘free’ emigration. The committee which framed the Act assumed these new agents would mean the ‘death’ of contractors.Footnote 24 Their stated intention was to encourage individual labourers to immigrate to Assam, travelling on their own account. ‘Free emigration’ emerged from the provisions of section 7 of Act I of 1882: ‘nothing in this Act shall be deemed to prohibit any native of India from emigrating to or entering into a contract to labour in a labour district.’Footnote 25 These free emigrants would not be subject to existing rules of registration and transportation. The Chief Commissioner of Assam, echoing the Committee which had framed the Act, stated
It was thought that the time had arrived when emigrants might be expected to come to Assam in large numbers without much assistance or at all events without the stimulus and aid of elaborate organisation then provided by the professional supplier of labour and that the system of contractors, arkathis and so forth would in time die a natural death.Footnote 26
However, the Act did not result in much ‘spontaneous’ migration to Assam; free emigration was not restricted to sardars, and provided no additional impetus to sardari recruitment.Footnote 27 Instead, the system, which proliferated rapidly, was a network of unlicensed and unsupervised recruiters who collected large groups of workers from all over the region in unregulated depots.Footnote 28 The contractor grew in strength, recruitment networks proliferated, prices of ‘coolies’ increased and sardars were drawn into the network of free unlicensed contractors.
The professional recruiters employed sub-contractors, who operated in the districts and villages. The range and variety of agents in the Assam ‘coolie business’ has not yet been fully comprehended. In 1896, the Labour Enquiry Commission mentioned five kinds of sub-agents: the ‘arkati’, ‘a villager of either sex and of any class’; the dafadar, who was described as a ‘free lance’ profiting from buying and selling labour among middleman’, a creature of ‘free’ emigration system and usually from North West Provinces and Oudh; the ‘free’ emigration agent; ‘the selecting agent’; licensed contractors and a variety of garden sardars, who were often formally or informally linked to other sub-agents.Footnote 29 As the chain of intermediaries extended, so the price of ‘coolies’ spiralled in the 1880s. The Labour Enquiry Commission held that the Act of 1882 had raised rather than reduced the cost of Assam recruits. In the case of Chota Nagpur, they attributed the increase to the emigrants’ preference for the more accessible Duars gardens, which they could reach by foot on their own and retain the link with their kin, community and village. The coal industry was also expanding in that area and they resisted large-scale export of labour, fearing an increase in the price of local labour. Also, of course, competition amongst the Assam gardens had increased with the unprecedented expansion of the industry. The cost of recruits gradually increased over the 1880s. In 1882, the cost of a ‘coolie’ was estimated at Rs 60. By 1893, the industry estimate had risen to Rs 90. The Commission found, in 1896, the average cost of the ‘best coolie’ or ‘first class junglies’ to be Rs 150, with the exception of ‘aboriginal tribes’ like the Kols and Gonds, who were cheaper at about Rs 125.Footnote 30 A woman recruit was estimated to cost between Rs 50 and Rs 100.Footnote 31 According to the Commission's calculations, the actual cost of the journey to Assam was about Rs 25, and there were probably small amounts advanced to intending emigrants as an incentive. The ‘rest of the money goes to middlemen’, argued the report.Footnote 32 The Commissioner of Chota Nagpur estimated a doubling in the cost of recruits between 1882 and 1890.Footnote 33
In 1899, the Deputy Commissioner of Ranchi confirmed that competition among the gardens had led to increase in price of labour and proliferation of recruiters. The only way to control the problem, he suggested, was for the gardens to agree to a fixation of the commission to be paid to a recruiter at a realistic level of something like Rs. 5. Such regulatory solutions were not accepted either by the industry or government and ‘the large class of men who at present make their living by what is practically man stealing’ remained, raising the cost of Assam labour.Footnote 34
State-led strategies failed to solve recruitment problems partly because of the informal linkages exploited by commercial recruiters. Official investigations revealed that such was the case with women recruiters. Between 1886 and 1889, the Annual Reports on Inland Emigration included a separate section on Sardarnis and/or female recruiters, signaling the importance of the subject in official debates at the time. Unable to gather statistics about female recruiters, however, some officers dismissed them as ineffective. In 1886, only Burdwan district reported garden sardarnis. Four apparently worked for a year in Ranigunge and were unable to find any recruits. Another fifth recruiter in the sudder subdivision, Kooloda, registered six recruits. Apart from these, there were no reports of certificated garden sardarnis, or licensed female recruiters. The Deputy Commissioner of Lohardugga noted the existence of a few female recruiters who, according to him, failed to recruit on any significant scale.Footnote 35 In 1887, ten female recruiters supplied about 38 workers for Assam and Sylhet.Footnote 36 These are negligible numbers, given the scale of Assam recruitment. In 1886, however, the sub-divisional officer at Giridi hinted at the real picture. Most female recruiters did not operate formally under licenses and certificates, rather, male recruiters of all types employed women especially widows and the wives of sardars to assist them in recruiting women migrants.Footnote 37 In 1887, several unlicensed female recruiters were found ‘surreptitiously employed by recruiters to collect young females’ who, the Joint Magistrate complained, entered ‘villages unsuspected . . . get away with abducted females long before the latter are missed.’ The difficulty was that ‘they worked secretly, there is always great difficulty in getting evidence against them.’Footnote 38 By 1889, Grant's reports were expressing the same argument: that female recruiters were ‘the servants of the free emigration agents’.Footnote 39 They slipped the official net because they operated informally.
The opprobrium of Assam migration was heightened by the unscrupulous and brutal practices adopted by the recruiters. That deception was the recruiters’ stock in trade, especially in recruiting women, was affirmed in nearly all official sources. Dr. Richards, for instance, agreed that ‘in some few cases, especially amongst the women, they appeared to have been deceived as to the purpose for which they were recruited’. Indeed, the deception usually survived the efforts of the Magistrates during registration. Such was the ‘influence of the recruiter’, he wrote, women believed the recruiter in preference to the registering officer.Footnote 40
It was by using unscrupulous means that professional contractors were able to supply the proportion of women demanded by planters. According to the Deputy Commissioner of Ranchi, in 1899, the large sums paid to recruiters could be regarded ‘as a reward for extra cunning in inducing coolies to go to Assam or compensation for the risk run in unlawfully inducing or compelling them to go.’ It was risk-money, an incentive to ‘iniquity’ or outright crime.Footnote 41 Contractors recruited more single women whereas garden sardars recruited more families, which included women. Since plantation managers insisted on a certain proportion of women in each batch, sometimes as high as fifty per cent, and were often agreeable to paying a premium for women recruits, contractors paid sardars to allow the women they recruited to count towards the contractors’ batches.Footnote 42
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, in Chotanagpur, the sardar accounted for double the recruits that contractors supplied to Assam, while ‘free’ labour was less than ten per cent of the total. If the whole of the Assam emigration is taken into account, the share of the contractors as well as free labour is much higher. Contractors and sardars had nearly equal shares—contractors accounted for some 40 per cent, while sardars provided about 45 per cent. Free labour fluctuated between 10 and 20 per cent. The impact of the Act of 1882 was contrary to the intentions of the framers. ‘Free labour’ did increase but at the cost of the sardari, not of contractors’ recruitment. Rather, the nexus between contractors and sardars resulted in a stagnation of sardari recruitment.
The 1882 Act increased, dramatically, total recruitment for Assam (except for a drop during 1885).Footnote 43 The ‘free’ emigrants’ share more than doubled after the passing of the Act. The share of sardari recruitment, however, remained more or less constant. In 1885–1886 the number of sardars licensed to recruit increased significantly, but their recruitment of workers did not increase, prompting the Superintendent of Emigration, Grant, to infer that sardars were not utilizing their certificates, but rather persuading emigrants into the ‘free’ system.Footnote 44 In 1887, again, the number of certificated sardars increased but the numbers registered under them declined. Year-on-year the chief increase was in free emigrants.Footnote 45 By 1889–1890, increasing irregularities in sardari recruitment began to be noticed, given the ‘increasing free system of collecting labour and the great temptation it offered to sardars of acting dishonestly by their employers.’Footnote 46 Indeed, even though contract emigration showed periodic upward trends, sardari recruitment started to decline.Footnote 47
In 1882–1883, licenses were granted to fewer local agents and the number of garden sardars under each agent increased, there being a tendency to place a larger number of sardars under the supervision of a smaller number of agents.Footnote 48 This trend may have led to a decrease in the number of rejections. Dr McConnell, Medical Inspector, argued that there was greater care in selection of emigrants in the recruiting districts.Footnote 49 Thus, in 1883, ‘importation under the Act considerably exceeded that of free labours.’ Planters, however, argued that ‘importation under the Act was much more expensive than free labour, owing to the formalities’ in the district of recruitment and on the road to Assam. Moreover, free emigration was quicker with ‘less risk of having the coolies enticed away by other recruiters’. The planters, therefore, overcame their distrust of contractors and disregarded the suitability of ‘Act coolies’. Instead, they became complicit with a system by which certified garden sardars sold the ‘good coolies to contractors’ and took ‘bad substitutes in exchange’.Footnote 50 This trend continued in the 1890s: Sardars sold ‘their coolies to arkatis at a price above what they receive from their own employers’.Footnote 51
In 1888, the Commissioner of the Chota Nagpur Division, C.C. Stevens, explained to the Government of Bengal that ‘sardari recruiting . . . is only possible at a restricted scale. A sardar working honestly . . . has no chance whatever against the professional recruiter.’Footnote 52 The sardars, operating with limited resources, routinely succumbed to temptations held out by professional recruiters and ended up as their unofficial agents. Large-scale recruiting and high profits invited, inevitably, unscrupulous middlemen, and ‘the new ‘Local Agent’ of the Act is too often nothing, but the old contractor writ large.’Footnote 53
Despite the attempts to introduce new players and distribute recruitment among multiple agents, the various systems of Assam recruitment tended, persistently, to converge. The habits of the contractor system plagued all other experiments. Most officers in recruiting districts felt that the very notion of ‘free’ emigration as it appeared in the 1882 Act was deeply fallacious. Mr Kaye, Assistant Superintendent of Police (Chota Nagpur Division) studied ‘free’ emigration and in his 1884 report wrote that the procedures of collecting and forwarding ‘free’ emigrants through the ‘Local Agents’ was closely copied from the contractors’ recruiting system.Footnote 54 Thus ‘free’ emigration was not only rapidly displacing the sardari recruitment, which the planters had professed to encourage but was also developing a close kinship with the contractor system. The evidence came from various districts of Bengal. In Burdwan, sardars sold their recruits to contractors, but usually to those supplying their own garden.Footnote 55 In Midnapur too, the sardari and contractors’ system overlapped. A recruiting depot and a sardari depot located near each other were found to be in the names of a father and his son.Footnote 56
Free emigration thus magnified the abuses of the contractors’ system. In his annual report of 1887, the Assam Commissioner admitted that ‘free’ emigration was not really free.Footnote 57 The emergence of the Dhubri system dispelled the hope that free emigration would lead to free labour. The Government of India had argued that ‘free emigration’ would eventually undermine the system of penal contracts and encourage a free labour market in Assam. The planters, as in the 1870s, were quick to apply the old contracts to the new situation. ‘Free emigrants’ were ‘free’ only up to Dhubri, penal contracts were imposed as soon as they disembarked.
Thus, the difference between the contractors’ and the ‘free’ coolie boiled down to one executing contracts in the district of recruitment, with immediate commencement of supervision, and the latter entering the same contract at a later stage en route to the plantation, once already in Assam, usually in Dhubri. This meant that there was no ‘registration’ and therefore no record of the emigrant in the recruiting district and that the longest part of the journey was undertaken without any supervision. By the late 1880s, the Dhubri system covered about 85 per cent of the emigrants to Assam.Footnote 58 With a free emigration system, the sardari system became more and more entangled with contract recruitment, a nexus that proved impossible to break over successive legislation in the next two decades. The official perception was, however, that the sardari system continued to be regarded as superior. The sardars ‘having been to the labour districts, have learnt the advantages to be derived there, and come back to take up their relations and friends to participate in them’.Footnote 59 This, to the official mind, minimized the risk of deception and particularly, illegitimate recruitment of women.
The Sohri Case: Garden Sardars and ‘abuses’ in women's recruitment
The first attack on Act I of 1882 by the ‘recruiting districts’, especially in respect of illegitimate recruitment of women, came from (Sir) J.W. Edgar, then the Officiating Commissioner of Chota Nagpur. Later as Chief Secretary to Government of Bengal, he played a critical role in garnering evidence against the abuses of the Assam system, which contributed to the abolition of free emigration by the Act of 1901. The case, which attracted his attention and led to his crusade against free emigration, was a disputed recruitment of a woman, Sohri, allegedly a minor, by a garden sardar. This case demonstrated the fallacy of the argument that garden sardars were less prone to fraud, deception or coercion with regard to women's recruitment. Rather, operating within the network of village, caste and community networks, they were perhaps more successful in exploiting disputes within the family, able to take advantage of the vulnerability of young women and enter into transactions with members of the family eager to make a profit from the escalating demand for women recruits. They were also able to make use of subordinate agencies of the state, especially at the village level, to decoy women to Assam.
On 3 March 1882, a woman named Sukwaro of village Sorju complained to the Sub-Deputy Collector of Palamou, who was then in camp, that her daughter Sohri had been abducted the previous night. Her statement was recorded thus:
There was a quarrel between myself and my daughter Sohri, aged about 12 or 13 years, owing to some family affairs. The Chowkidar of the village came to my house in the evening, and had a talk with my daughter, and then, with his assistance, I assume, my daughter was enticed away by the sirdar Dhansai without my consent.Footnote 60
Dhansai Kharwar, a garden sardar, had been in the village with Mr Briscoe, European Assistant of the Panipoota Tea Garden in Assam, had taken 36 coolies and 17 dependents and registered them (with about a hundred more coolies) four days later in Ranchi. The girl, Sohri, was registered that day, but under a false name and description. Her mother claimed that she was an unmarried girl, about 12 or 13 years old, and had left her mother's house without her knowledge or consent.Footnote 61 Was this a case of voluntary migration or kidnapping?
The chowkidar admitted that he had received Re 1 from Dhansai and had gone to consult the mother, Sukwaro, ‘afterwards she [Sohri] ran away.’ The Sub-Deputy Collector examined the chowkidar and another witness, and the case was then reported to Mr Renny, the Assistant Commissioner at Palamou. Mr Renny transferred the case to the Deputy Commissioner of Lohardungga, since Briscoe and Kharwar, together with the recruits, had already left Palamou. Deputy Commissioner, A.W.B. Power, took some trouble over the case. He agreed with Edgar that the case highlighted the drawbacks of Act I of 1882 and called ‘attention to the advisability of further regulating emigration to the tea districts as far as females are concerned’.Footnote 62
A suit was registered against the three accused, Briscoe, Kharwar, and the chowkidar, Munni Bhuiya, under sections of the Indian Penal Code. First, Power argued, recruitment in Palamou was difficult and ‘extraordinary measures’ were often adopted. The region was sparsely populated, and within 30 miles of Sorju, the Nowa Estate (under the Court of Wards) was settling peasants on wasteland. Emigrants to Assam were, chiefly, ‘fraudulent debtors and absconders from justice’.Footnote 63 Moreover, Mr Briscoe had written to Mr Renny, Assistant Commissioner that, far from being able to recruit emigrants, he could scarcely get coolies to carry his traps. Briscoe and his sardars had announced that they were acting under instructions from the Sub-Divisional Officer in sending coolies to Assam. The Deputy Commissioner admitted that there was ‘nothing novel in this’ since the countersigned license was often represented ‘as Sirkar Ka Hookum’Footnote 64 and recruits readily believed that the license ‘stamped and signed by a Hakim’ empowered recruiters to award ‘Sarkari Naukori’.Footnote 65 However, Briscoe also insinuated that he had a personal and an official relationship with the Assistant Commissioner.Footnote 66 Considering that Mr Briscoe was in close proximity to the place of alleged abduction, and presuming that his sardar was acting with his knowledge, Power admitted a prima facie case against the three accused and scheduled trial for May 1882. When the time came, however, he changed his mind. Unable to find ‘sufficient legal evidence on the record to warrant . . . putting the accused formally on their trial’, he discharged the three men.Footnote 67
During the trial it emerged that the girl was not only registered under a false name but also as the wife of the garden sardar, Dhansai Kharwar. No marriage had actually taken place though it was acknowledged that she had cohabited with Dhansai.Footnote 68 The Government Pleader argued that Kharwar should be put on trial under section 366, Penal Code, since it was proved and he had admitted that the girl had been seduced and subjected to illicit intercourse. But Power argued that such an action required evidence (of which there was none) that she was either by force compelled, or by deceitful means induced, to leave her home. There had from the beginning been stories of various exchanges of money. Initially, the chowkidar, Munni Bhuiya, had testified to the Sub-Deputy Collector, ‘I received from the sirdar Dhansai Re. 1 as Bakhshish. I went to the Massamut's house, and had a talk with her, and not with her daughter.’Footnote 69 But Kharwar put another spin to the story. He claimed that the mother sold him the girl for Rs 10. There was no evidence on either side, but the mother ‘frankly admits’, according to Power, ‘that if she had been paid properly, she would not have complained’. Power conjectures that the dispute arose from the fact that Rs 10 was the agreed figure but that the mother did not receive the full amount. These figures and the hint of transactions appear, without much substance, in the records of the case. The officers were confounded by claims and counter-claims. ‘It is idle to speculate’ writes Power, ‘whether any money was paid and if so, who kept it’, even though, if Sohri proved to be a minor, the payment of Rs 10 for her would invite a charge under section 373 of the Penal Code.Footnote 70
John Edgar had believed that a girl of only 12 or 13 years would not be able to sustain ‘a concocted story’ under ‘cross examination’ in court and that the truth would be revealed. But the truth that emerged was quite as unexpected as it was unclear. Did the mother want the daughter returned or the money? The girl, her age not very clearly established, appeared to be a consenting party from the beginning, having run away because of a ‘quarrel’ regarding unnamed ‘family affairs’.Footnote 71 At this late stage of review, a new argument appeared. Sohri, ‘the cause of all the trouble’ was registered under a false name, due ‘not to any malpractices originating in defects in the law, but to a desire to escape from an uncongenial marriage’.Footnote 72
The contradictions of the Sorju case resonated in a number of other reported cases. Was the dispute about the mother's consent or was it a dispute between the seller (the mother, as the owner/guardian) and the buyer (the planter) and intermediaries (the sardar)? The issue was not just a straightforward one of ‘slavery’ or ‘trafficking’, in the way British officialdom sought to understand it. Indrani Chatterjee, in her pioneering work on slavery, has argued that between slavery and transactions in persons there was always a thin line, and such transactions were an important element in kinship relations and the constitution of households.Footnote 73
By the 1860s, there was mounting evidence of a variety of transactions in persons, which eluded colonial legal categories. The Orissa famine (1866) brought into focus the issue of sale of girls by fathers (or other surviving members of the family). A series of investigations yielded uncomfortable data regarding the widespread and general acceptance of such practices. The buyers of young girls were usually older ‘prostitutes’, who ‘adopted’ and apprenticed them as a source of future income, or men, who sought to set up young girls in degrees of informal sexual/cohabitational relationships. Further enquiry revealed that among intermediate and lower castes, marriages too involved such transactions. The bride price, far more common than dowry in the nineteenth century, was not just a payment to the father upon marriage. Wives could be bought and sold between extant and prospective husbands too. Divorce was conditional upon compensation to the husband in such communities.Footnote 74
In this context, opposition to women's migration may have been about loss of productive and sexual labour, but also, and perhaps more importantly, about the right/ownership of parents/elders, usually male, in the persons of subordinate members of the family. Recruitment of ‘free’ labour was a denial of the family's right to compensation, the price for the transfer of ownership. This perception underlay many cases (as cited by local officers and other opponents of Assam recruitment) in which the family, the father or the husband, sought to ‘sell’ the daughter or the wife to recruiters.
Chota Nagpur officers highlighted the problems of free emigration, recruitment of women, particularly adivasi women, and the role of the family and community. Most cases they reported involved kidnapping, abductions and rape. They portrayed female recruits as victims, and recruiters as villains, emphasizing the tragedy of the deserted family on the one hand, and the destitution of young girls deluded by recruiters and conflicts within the family on the other. Local officers found their expectations of the harmonious integrity of family and community challenged by the reach and stretch of Assam traffic. The notion of the sardars’ commitment to kin, caste, community and village belied their experience on the ground. Evidence of malpractice exposed similar ‘abuses’ by all categories of recruiters. Official indignation did not lead to an examination of their own misplaced assumptions but to a condemnation of the corruptibility of commerce and its chief agents, recruiters, and increasingly, sardars.
Policy-makers in the upper echelons of Indian government and the plantocracy, however, remained unconvinced by local disillusionment. They changed the terms of the debate, arguing that free emigration had cut the sardar short in mid-career, his potential remained untapped and that the system deserved another chance. Thus, the new Act of 1901, which abolished free emigration and ushered in a new era of regulation in Assam recruitment, clearly spelled out policies for the promotion of the garden sardar. The Act gave power to local governments to prohibit contractors in their area, a privilege many traditional recruitment districts exercised. Soon sardari emerged as the chief form of recruitment. But new problems were added to the old; planters became increasingly hostile to the garden sardar, complaining of the difficulty of controlling such large numbers of recruiters; costs remained high; and by the late 1920s, the sardar recruited on average less than two workers per head. A new round of reforms became imperative.
Conclusion
Colonial legislation sought repeatedly to define, restrict and regulate forms of labour brokerage that developed around the Assam system. In the nineteenth century, two classes of recruiters were pitted against each other—professional contractors and garden sardars. Planters and the colonial state expressed a preference for the latter, letting them operate as informal agents, primarily in the hope that sardars would open up the field to a larger number of players and cheapen recruitment. The promotion of the sardars was premised on the argument that as informal and non-market agents, and because they recruited within the kin, caste and community networks, they would be less prone to the excesses committed by commercial agents. As allegations of ‘abuses’ in the recruitment of women and tribals gathered momentum, the sardar was offered as the solution. Planters argued, and the British Indian state agreed, despite contrary evidence from recruiting districts, that sardars, as ‘insiders’ were less likely to exploit the vulnerabilities of weaker sections of the population in the process of provisioning labour for Assam. The sardar, himself a worker in the plantation, was more amenable to control and was promoted as a means of undercutting the professional contractors’ monopoly of labour supply, cheapening emigration, addressing the ‘abuses’ of recruitment and solving the planters’ ever-increasing demand for labour.
There were contrary voices, doubtful of the efficacy of the sardar as well as the notion that they would remain untouched by the rampant large-scale commercialization of recruitment in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A range of such opinion came from local levels of government, missionaries and Indian public opinion but failed to influence policy-making in the nineteenth century. Ever since the sardar was introduced by legislation in 1870, they were given increasingly more opportunity and advantages in the hope that they would oust the contractors. The Act of 1882 and the institution of ‘free emigration’, however, had quite the opposite effect. It reinforced the nexus between contractors and sardars, decreased the field and effectiveness of sardari recruitment and helped forge an alliance of official and non-official opinion hostile to the Assam system. The Government of India was persuaded into a volte-face in 1901. New legislation abolished ‘free emigration’, giving the sardar concrete advantages over the contractor. The vicissitudes of the Act of 1901 is another chapter in the history of Assam recruitment, still awaiting the researcher's attention.
The debates around the garden sardar are a crucial aspect not only of the story of Assam recruitment, but also of the colonial discourse of labour in the nineteenth century. The notions of the immobility of labour, its lack of responsiveness to economic stimuli, being embedded in primordial relations of kin, caste and community, many of the shibboleths of colonial officialdom, often reproduced by historians of labour, were in full play in the way the question of the garden sardar was addressed by the state and by planters.
