On June 16, 1915, in a letter to Jehangir Bomanji Petit, the Secretary of the South African Indian Fund, Mohandas K. Gandhi expressed his strong disapproval of the indentured labor system in the following words:
I feel that I ought to place on record my strong conviction, based upon close personal observation extending over a period of twenty years, that the system of indentured emigration is an evil which can only be ended. No matter how humane the employers may be, it does not lend itself to the moral well-being of the men affected by it. I therefore feel that your Committee should lose no time in approaching the Government of India with a view to securing entire abolition of the system for every part of the Empire.Footnote 2
Gandhi's indictment of the indentured system found its way into the liberal historiography on indentured labor, which presented indentured (contract) workers’Footnote 3 experiences within the British imperial state as “a new system of slavery.”Footnote 4 By investigating the hitherto unstudied transcolonial migration between Mauritius, India, and the Caribbean in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, this essay complicates such straightforward liberal characterizations of global labor force formation under the auspices of colonial capital. Indeed, while coercion was a crucial component of the indentured labor system,Footnote 5 indentured workers themselves often used the opportunity afforded by the global demand for their labor to engage in transcolonial migration. While capital sought to confine workers to specific plantations, the very nature of the demand for labor enabled workers to defy the dictates of capital and craft new lives on distant shores. The nature of oceanic travel and the dynamics of capital further enabled a category of workers to move from one colony to another in search of better livelihoods and thus made them globally mobile. These migrations did not restrict them to the inner and hermetic borders of either the Indian Ocean World or the Atlantic Ocean World.Footnote 6 Rather, such migrations reflected the workers’ search for jobs and their quest for family lives through transcolonial networks within the British Empire. By situating labor migration within oceanic frameworks (the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic), this paper explains why and how indentured workers subverted imperial apparatuses to improve their lives and used social networks within the British empire that transcended the geographical boundaries of oceanic economies.
Historiographical Contexts and Debates
Approaches to indentured labor may be divided into two perspectives. The first, comprised of various branches of liberal, anticolonial, humanitarian, and neo-Marxist readings, suggests that indentured labor was akin to slavery and that receiving societies furthered workers’ exploitation at multiple levels (gender, caste, and class).Footnote 7 The second, espousing a modernist and neoliberal stance, suggests that indentured workers were rational decision makers who opted for migration and voluntarily sought to leave India. According to the second group of scholars, such informed decisions would inevitably lead to the betterment of indentured workers’ lives.Footnote 8
However, it is a representative of the first approach, Hugh Tinker's A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920, that has had resounding significance within the historiography on indentured labor from India. The term “new system of slavery” reveals simplistic affinities with a hegemonic Afro-Atlantic model of slavery.Footnote 9 This emphasis on the Atlantic model of slavery, a reflection of Eurocentric understandings of labor migration, led Tinker to ignore the interconnectedness of the oceans. This further strengthens his inability to engage with workers’ capability to negotiate with different groups of employers in order to further their own interests in a globalized labor recruitment system. Tinker equated indentured labor with slavery by emphasizing irregular and forced recruitment by labor intermediaries, unrealistic contractual terms, and the destitution of recruits. Tinker's influence can be observed in the recent postcolonial scholarship of Madhavi Kale, who despite her criticism of Tinker (and her emphasis on critical interrogation of colonial archives),Footnote 10 focuses primarily on imperial elites and thus neglects the voices of indentured workers.
The “new system of slavery” thesis sparked a sizable revisionist scholarship. Kissoonsingh Hazareesingh and Brij Lal took an oppositional stance to that of Tinker, suggesting that the indentured migrant was an autonomous decision maker who crafted his or her way to the new destination. They also saw emigration as a political response to British rule in India.Footnote 11 According to such revisionist literature, the indentured agricultural worker's break with the land of his birth had occurred before he met the recruiter and indicates that the worker was actively looking for overseas opportunities.Footnote 12
A third position emerged in the work of Marina Carter, who argues that the above two schools of thought ignore the role that returnee migrants played in motivating new migrants to take the route to overseas destinations.Footnote 13 This essay builds upon Carter's thesis and focuses attention on transoceanic migration by workers. It also rejects the view that the colonial state was a monolithic entity that extended from its headquarters in London to various government offices of colonies in India, Mauritius, British Guiana, Trinidad, and elsewhere.Footnote 14 In order to highlight the complex role of different ruling entities in plantation colonies, we use the term “colonial governments” to indicate the plurality and overlapping nature of administrative structures and to avoid the suggestion that the term “colonial state” signified an orchestrated labor migration.Footnote 15
To develop this line of argument, we reject a preformed category of “indentured migrant worker.” Frederick Cooper has suggested that a scholar may use these terms as “analytic categories … for description and analysis” and miss how “historical actors deployed similar terms” in their own historical contexts.Footnote 16 By doing so, the scholar ignores the ordinary desires and motivations of people who migrated and eventually re-migrated, thus resisting capital's sway through capital's own need for more labor in distant corners of the global plantation systems.
Beginnings of the Indentured System in Mauritius—1834
The arrival of indentured labor to the island of Mauritius coincided with the global expansion of sugar plantations and the collapse of slave-based economies. As the British gained control over Mauritius in 1810, they sought to transform the island into a sugar plantation colony. Under the British, the number of sugar estates rose from 106 in 1820 to 259 in 1858.Footnote 17 The growth in sugar production obviously generated new demands for labor. As cholera and various diseases affected slaves and as the British Parliament sought to ban the slave trade from 1807 onward, planters turned their attention to India for “‘free’ agricultural laborers.”Footnote 18 Since India was a pivotal component of the British imperial networks of trade and commerce in the nineteenth century, it also became the site for labor catchment areas for British global networks of plantations. More than 450,000 indentured Indian workers reached Mauritius before the migration system ended in 1910.Footnote 19
Faced with the exodus of emancipated slaves, planters from all over the world—from Natal in South Africa to the Malay peninsula in the Indian Ocean rim, Fiji in the Pacific Ocean, and the Caribbean Islands, as well as the British, Dutch, and French Guianas on the mainland of South America in the Atlantic world—searched for a supply of labor and, more importantly, a stable workforce that could, in theory, be paid minimal wages and settled in the sugar plantations. Indentured contracts, it was hoped, would bind these workers to the plantations for a substantial period of time and would stabilize the production regime. In recruiting such workers, the planters and the colonial governments relied upon the indentured workers’ presumed ignorance of their new work environment.
The image of ignorant workers dictated the strategies of the planters. In 1834, Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co., a British commercial agency in Calcutta with business links to Mauritian planters brought the first seventy-five indentured workers to Mauritius. By June 6, 1836, “two thousand natives” had reached the island.Footnote 20 Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, planters such as John Gladstone, father of future British Prime Minister William Evart Gladstone and a planter with interests in Demerara and Jamaica, contacted Arbuthnot noting that planters in the Caribbean “were most desirous to obtain and introduce Labourers from other Quarters,” especially given that “plantation labour in the field is very light” and that the “task work … is usually completed by two o'clock in the afternoon.”Footnote 21 Far from light, the work pattern on sugar plantations proved to be very demanding, especially because of the volcanic topography of Jamaica and Demerara.Footnote 22 Gladstone sought “young, active, able-bodied people” from Bengal whose “wives [would] be disposed to work in the field as well” for “not less than five years or more than seven years.”Footnote 23 Arbuthnot acquiesced to Gladstone's request and further underlined how “the Natives being perfectly ignorant of the Place they agree to go to, or the Length of the Voyage they are undertaking” would go to Demerara and Jamaica instead of Mauritius.Footnote 24 Arbuthnot's colonial anthropological assumptions about indentured workers were numerous. According to him, the “[Dhangurs] from the Hills … north of Calcutta” were “well-limbed and active, without prejudices of any kind,” had “no Religion, no Education, … no Wants beyond Eating, Drinking, and Sleeping; and to procure which they are willing to labour.”Footnote 25 In brief, the early indentured workers, in planters’ perceptions and as transmitted to the colonial archive, “were more akin to the Monkey than [to] the Man.”Footnote 26 The presumptions of Arbuthnot, an ally of the colonial governments, are an example of the early ethnic and racial categorization of indentured workers in Mauritius.Footnote 27 The recruitment of indentured workers also demonstrates how employers within island sugar colonies and the colonial governments operated on a global scale while hoping that labor would be tied to the narrow confines of their separate destinations.
In the beginning the hopes of the global masters of IndianFootnote 28 workers were not belied. A commission of inquiry appointed to investigate working conditions for these indentured workers concluded that “Coolies and other natives exported to Mauritius and elsewhere were … induced to come to Calcutta by misrepresentation and deceit….”Footnote 29 The ignorance attributed to workers in the report took various forms. For example, F. W. Birch, the Superintendent of the Calcutta Police explained that duffadars (native local recruiters) and crimps held onto six months of pay of indentured workers because of the latter's ignorance. Because of their credulity, indentured workers arrived at their destinations with only two or three rupees on their persons.Footnote 30 Taramony, the sister of Nobin Bawory, an indentured worker from Moomeeavya, Bancoorah, in India, reported that her brother was promised five rupees a month and that he could return home at the end of a year.Footnote 31 However, her brother had not been back for “two or three years” and had not “sent any money” to his family.Footnote 32
The 1841 Calcutta Commission of Enquiry depicts the appalling conditions of workers at various stages of their migration. But workers did not tolerate such a situation for long and soon sought better opportunities. While immigration rates from India increased in the late 1850sFootnote 33 due to the expansion of sugar plantation complexes, indentured workers were also returning to India. For example, on January 11, 1850, Daccoo, Rama, and Dhurma were “desirous of returning home without delay … at their own expense and in a vessel of their own choice.”Footnote 34 The reasons for return migration were various. The Protector of Immigrants, Thomas Hugon, sheds light on this process by explaining how “the rate of wages which labourers can obtain here [in Mauritius] is well known in India, they would not bind themselves for less without fraud being employed.”Footnote 35 In a skeptical fashion, Hugon further details how “immigrants on their arrival [in Mauritius] [were] certainly under the influence of comrades … whom they follow blindly.”Footnote 36 However, Hugon also relates how he encountered “numerous instances where [indentured workers] have acted for themselves, making enquiries as to the Estate, or for relations already in the Island whom they wished to join.”Footnote 37 In many ways, indentured workers had developed complex information networks stretching from their places of origin in India to the different nodes of colonial plantation societies.
While the number of workers moving to Mauritius from India and various colonies grew rapidly in the 1850s, it had already started in the early phase of the indentured system in a more nebulous form. For example, after the first five-year indentured contracts expired in 1839, Chapman Barclay, a large proprietor in Mauritius, sent Dhibby Deen back to India to recruit more men. Dhibby Deen, “a man of good character, who return[ed] to his native country” would have his passage paid, “[the] cost of his food, as well as [that of] any able-bodied men who may wish to accompany him, not exceeding 50 in number.”Footnote 38 Thus regular to-and-fro migration of workers to Mauritius from India in the early phase of indentured immigration was possible because of the planters’ requisitions for more labor and colonial government's structural support in the form of free passages.
However, upon taking office in 1851, the island's new Governor, T. M. Higginson, canceled “[the] right of migrants to a paid return passage to India at the end of their indenture.”Footnote 39 But since 1850, several immigrants had already been able to pay for their passage back to India without relying on the free passage offered by the colonial government of Mauritius (as evidenced above by Daccoo's example). Not only did indentured workers pay their own fares, they also paid for passengers who were accompanying them. For example, on January 28, 1856, Duljeet, Bhunjun, and Bundhooram agreed to pay the passage of the female immigrant Dookhny.Footnote 40 As the colonial government attempted to restrict indentured workers’ mobility—by banning the free return passage, for example—it also unwittingly created information networks that indentured workers used to their benefit. Returnees informed potential migrants of possibilities available in Mauritius. At the same time, some indentured workers’ economic situations in the receiving societies had improved to such an extent that they could also afford their own passages.
Gender and Migration: Resistance, Information Networks, and Remigration
As international sugar pricesFootnote 41 increased and colonial governments sought to obtain physically fit labor for an export-oriented sugar colony between the late 1830s and 1860s, a change in migration patterns occurred. A notable feature of this new migration was the presence of women. In 1838, female indentured Indian immigrants were less than 2 percent of the immigrant population.Footnote 42 Planters and colonial officials perceived female immigration as a stabilizing force for the predominantly adult single male migration that had hitherto been employed and sought to increase it. While this action would increase the “average individual labour cost,” by 1861 “the public treasury undertook to bear half the cost of female immigration in addition to paying bounties to their introducers.”Footnote 43 They hoped that this measure would tie male workers to their respective plantations.
Ironically, colonial encouragement of female immigration contributed to the circular migration of time-expired migrants (those whose indenture had ended after five years) and who sought either to bring their families to Mauritius or take their families back to India. Time-expired or returnee immigrants had spent between five and fifteen years in Mauritius. They had managed to save and could further pay themselves out of their indenture or pay their passages.Footnote 44
Indentured workers who settled for a longer period on the island, as opposed to re-migrating to other colonies for better opportunities, faced various obstacles. By 1847, the local colonial government crystallized the difference between “new” immigrants, those who had reached Mauritius for the first time, and Old immigrants, those who had stayed back and, in several cases, left the sugar estates to become vegetable hawkers. The Colonial Office considered that indentured workers had been introduced solely to provide agricultural labor. Thus it penalized workers who pursued other avenues.Footnote 45 In 1849 Ordinance 7 was passed to increase policing to prevent desertion from sugar estates. Workers who left the plantations but remained on the island gradually came to be considered vagrants.
Vagrancy laws were not new in British territories and had appeared as early as the mid-fourteenth century in England.Footnote 46 As they evolved in other parts of the British Empire, vagrancy laws were used to control and mobilize labor. In Mauritius, Ordinance 31 of 1867 (also known as the 1867 Law) came to define former indentured workers as vagrants. It was Old immigrants who were particularly subject to the strict control of the 1867 Labor Law.
The former indentured workers, also known as old immigrants, had long-standing grievances against the pass system, which was stipulated in the 1867 ordinance. Old immigrants were required to carry a photographed police pass at all times. Failure to produce the pass whenever it was demanded resulted in arbitrary imprisonment and physical violence. Old immigrants often complained of “the number and oppressiveness of the fees charged for duplicate tickets …, [the] ‘ill-treatment in the Immigration Office,’ and ‘arbitrary and vexatious conduct of the police in carrying out the law.’”Footnote 47 The fear of vagrancy among freely mobile workers—those who were unattached to sugar estates and had started engaging in other trades such as selling vegetables—deeply disturbed the political authorities. The double-pronged purpose of vagrancy lawsFootnote 48 was to limit the peasantization of the local economy, whereby former indentured workers (Old immigrants) resorted to selling agricultural goods grown on their small plots. This was a global trend in plantation colonies.
Old immigrant workers’ discontent with Ordinance 31 was reflected in the petitions of 1871 presented to the Royal Commissioners, William Frere and Victor Williamson, two London-based lawyers who had been sent to Mauritius to investigate Indians’ conditions. Adolphe de Plévitz, a GermanFootnote 49 who came to Mauritius in 1859 and settled on his father-in-law's estate, collected 9,401 signatures to present to Frere and Williamson.Footnote 50 For example, Dilloo, No. 82,500, an Old immigrant who was a “gardener,” related the abuse of the pass system:
About the month of July 1868, I was living at the Nouvelle Découverte. On a certain morning four policemen came, and, without a warrant, entered my premises and asked for our papers; I was able to show the papers for myself and wife, but, through my house having been burnt down a short time previously, I could not show the police the acts of birth of my children born at Mauritius, as they had perished in the flames, and as I had no copies of them; but I explained this to the police: my children being respectively 9, 12, and 13 years of age, notwithstanding this (and the affair occurred on a Wednesday morning at 5 o'clock), the police arrested my three children as vagabonds. They were taken to the Moka police station, a distance of seven miles, and were locked up there till the following Friday, when they were discharged at noon, the evidence of a gentleman residing at the Nouvelle Découverte having proved to the satisfaction of the Magistrate that they were not vagabonds. Secondly—About the month of September 1868, my son Seewagalam (the second son in the previous complaint), went to Flacq to visit a relative. My son, although a Creole of the colony, was arrested by the police in the Flacq district on his return, sent to Pamplemousses, and sentenced by the Magistrate there to 10 days’ imprisonment with hard labour as a vagabond.Footnote 51
By the late 1860s and early 1870s, more than 200,000 indentured workers had stayed back in Mauritius. Dilloo, a former indentured Indian worker was one of them and had started a family there. Once workers’ contracts ended, planters had no legal tool at their disposal to make them renew their contracts. Such old immigrants would leave the sugar estates and become gardeners as was the case for Dilloo. Ordinance 31 of 1867 was designed to force them to stay on the sugar estates. In the above quote, the policing method underlines how the planters and the island's local government sought to prevent the desertion of indentured workers prior to the lapse of their contracts. This is precisely why the colonial government in Mauritius targeted old immigrants who saw themselves as part and parcel of the colony (for example, in Dilloo's reference to his “Creole” son). This story was but one example of many. In his petition, Ramluckhun, another gardener, explained how he “prepared everything for [his] marriage, and spent for that purpose a sum of $50” and how:
A sergeant of police and two constables came to my house and knocked at the door, which I opened, when the sergeant entered, in spite of my remonstrances, and looking all round, with the help of this lantern, it being then early in the morning, bade me come out, without allowing me time to dress, asked for my papers, which I immediately produced, consisting of my photograph ticket, a police pass for the district of Pamplemousses, lease of ground, and a permit for the sale of the produce of my garden in the said district; in spite of which I was taken by him to the high road, where I found many others who had also been arrested. I had to leave my poor aged parents, of whom I am the sole support, which I explained to the sergeant; and was taken before the Magistrate the third day, to whom I explained my case and was told to return on the following Friday, which I did, and had to do, by order of the Magistrate, for three consecutive Fridays. At last, I was released; no reasons whatsoever having been given me for such proceedings, which caused me a very serious loss. In fact, up to the present time, I have not been able to recover from it.Footnote 52
News of the harassment of ex-indentured workers traveled to India and informed future migrants as they selected a destination. This is confirmed in Major Pitcher's report published in the Royal Gazette of January 13, 1883. In his numerous encounters with potential recruits to Mauritius, Major Pitcher recounts the following:
[A]mongst returned emigrants there seem to be some popular notions on the subject. Trinidad (Chini Ta'l) has the preference, then Demerara (Damra or Demeraila). All speak well of Jamaica. Little is known yet of either Fiji or Natal. Mauritius (More righteous and Mirch) is admitted to have advantages in the shortness of the journey, the cheapness of the return passage, and (for the lazy) in the payments of monthly wages in the place of a daily task, or rather piecework; but industrious people prefer the latter. Rightly or wrongly, Mauritius had acquired a doubtful reputation in some of the lower districts, and at Gorakhpur I was told by a recruiter that Coolies would sometimes say that they were ready to go to any colony but Mauritius. We know from the latest report that this feeling is most unjust to Mauritius of the present day, and any discredit attaching to it must be a reflection of the old days of “Vagrant hunts”…Footnote 53
In other words, the transoceanic network of communication informed subsequent patterns of migration. Vagrant hunts under Article 31 of Ordinance 1867 in Mauritius influenced the island's image among potential recruits in India who, faced with ecological deterioration, demographic pressure on land, famines, caste discrimination, class exploitation, gender marginalization in colonial India, and seeming planter despotism abroad, sought destinations that offered better opportunities.
Migration to the Atlantic World
Global labor migration that spanned the oceans (the Indian, Atlantic, and PacificFootnote 54 ) was not uncommon. Once the indentured system was implemented in Mauritius, it was quickly replicated in other corners of the British Empire. Here British Guiana (including Demerara) and Trinidad need to be considered in conjunction with each other given their geographical proximity and how migration between these locations functioned.Footnote 55 By January 1838, four hundred men and some women and children reached Demerara and Berbice.Footnote 56 However, abolitionists’ and humanitarians’ ardor halted the system temporarily in the West Indies. Moreover various groups of Indian employers viewed the overseas labor migration as a contributing factor toward wage increase within India and further condemned emigration of labor to Mauritius and Demerara.Footnote 57
After much lobbying from the planter class, indentured migration was reopened in 1844.Footnote 58 By 1846, British Guiana had received 7,617 immigrants; Jamaica, 4,250; and Trinidad, 4,159.Footnote 59 However, because of the “scarcity of shipping,” emigration agents in Calcutta and Madras were unable “to engage three ships” to ship laborers to the Atlantic.Footnote 60 While the indentured labor flow to Mauritius continued to increase, the West Indian colonies were at a loss and could not compete with their Indian Ocean competitor, as they “were quite unable to provide funds for any further immigration….”Footnote 61
Despite the great distance separating the Caribbean colonies from Mauritius, a number of similarities existed across the oceans. As in Mauritius, indentured workers’ contracts in the Caribbean were for five years and included a free return passage to India.Footnote 62 In the Caribbean also, the colonial governments sought to regulate the labor market through various legal strictures. For instance, in Trinidad, the 1854 Consolidating Ordinance provided a free return passage to indentured immigrants who came before that year. Both groups (those who came before and those who came after 1854) “had to serve as labourers for a period of three years, and could then re-indenture themselves for a further two years or buy out their remaining time by paying … the colonial government.”Footnote 63 Thus indentured workers who had completed their initial contract could renew it, if they chose to do so. However, contract conditions within the Caribbean differed. For example, in Dutch Guiana (present-day Surinam), migrants were given a “free return passage immediately upon expiration of their 5-year indenture contracts.”Footnote 64 Conversely, workers in British Guiana had to work “two five-year terms” before obtaining a free passage home. Far from capitulating to oceanic barriers, the British colonial governments found ways to fuel the ever-increasing demands for labor from various parts of the globe. However, oceanic distances were such that the number of workers who returned to the Caribbean islands after their journeys to India was possibly lower than those who went back to Mauritius.
Shipping shortcomings in the Indian Ocean port of Calcutta slowed the introduction of indentured labor into the Caribbean. Competition among receiving colonies had been felt since the 1840s, when Mauritius had firmly reestablished itself as a destination with the Calcutta emigration agents and other labor intermediaries.Footnote 65 In that decade, Mr. White, a West Indies Emigration Agent, attempted to trace the popularity of Mauritius and found that
returned emigrants, men who had previously been [there] and who had returned … at the expiration of … five years, or who had anticipated that period by paying themselves a portion of the return passage money had acquired the confidence of the proprietors or managers of the plantations on which they had been located….Footnote 66
Therefore, Mr. White, dejectedly wrote:
All these circumstances combine to make the Mauritius emigration attractive to the natives of India, and to inspire them with confidence, and as now conducted it may be considered as being on a permanent and satisfactory footing. While it continues open I apprehend the natives will give a preference to it over all other emigration.Footnote 67
What is evident here is the ability of workers to navigate the complex opportunities offered by the overseas migration system and to choose their preferred destination based on available information harvested through diverse informal networks. Yet in the 1850s this situation changed radically.
Between 1850 and 1853, emigration restarted for the West Indian colonies. In 1857, W. Walker, Governor of Demerara, noted “the very large amounts [of cash] carried home [to India] by these people, of whom the majority have been little more than five years resident in the colony.”Footnote 68 Governor Walker was shocked at the not small amount of $28,959.98 Footnote 69 that “259” statute adults were taking with them. One driver from the Arabian coast of Demerara, who had reached the colony in 1846, took with him $3,122.Footnote 70 Another driver, who also had a shop and had reached the colony in 1847, was carrying $2,456.08.Footnote 71 Indeed, many of those who returned with cash to India could be labor intermediaries who used the contradictions inherent in the powerful political economy of sugar to make a small fortune.Footnote 72
However, the successful operation of such labor recruiting and managing ventures was intricately tied to the variation in prices of sugar on the international market. The late nineteenth century saw a remarkable increase in sugar production. British Guiana and Trinidad saw their sugar production increase by 270 percent between 1852 and 1908.Footnote 73 However, the sugar industry's fortunes were not to last. Competition from other parts of the globe, as well as an increase of beet sugar industry in France, further lowered sugar prices for planters in British Guiana.Footnote 74 By 1896, the British Guianese producer received, on average, £9.60 for a ton of sugar.Footnote 75 Such a dismal situation laid the ground for the rise of new commodities within the Caribbean political economy. One of them was rice.
The difficulties of the sugar industry were not to stop indentured workers. One possible attraction of Demerara to returnees could have been its nascent peasant economy, since rice paddy cultivation flourished under the efforts of post-indentured workers.Footnote 76 They built up a rice plantation economy that had been initiated by marooned slaves, who had turned to rice production after fleeing planters’ oppression.Footnote 77 Moreover, strikes on sugar estates affected sugar production. For example, thirteen strikes took place on British Guiana's sugar estates between 1884 and 1903.Footnote 78
Besides the rice economy's ascendance and the crisis of the sugar industry, other factors influenced the return and eventual permanent residence of indentured workers in the Caribbean. In order to stabilize the labor market, planters and the colonial governments sought to settle the workers in the colonies instead of allowing them to return to India. Furthermore, planters in Trinidad and other British Caribbean colonies were reluctant to fulfill their obligation to provide return passages back to India. Thus, while Governor Arthur H. Gordon introduced a policy in 1869 that allowed Indians to get “a plot of land at the end of their period of indenture …,”Footnote 79 most Indian cane farmers had already bought their own land.Footnote 80 While some was for the cultivation of rice and cocoa, most of it ended up being used for sugar cane.
Acquisition of land was not necessarily beneficial, however. Probably, ex-indentured workers exercised their choice to stay on the island given the opportunity to buy land. These settlements were, however, not always very successful. Sometimes the location of the settlements was unhealthy.Footnote 81 In other cases, immigrants could not choose the location of the settlement, and many subsequently felt that the “land commutation scheme”Footnote 82 was merely a plan to rob them of their return passage. K. O. Laurence has argued that planters were opposed to the possible success of the land allotments and preferred for workers to remain on sugar estates rather than cultivate their own land.Footnote 83 Not surprisingly, planters were opposed to the development of a more open labor market in which alternative earning opportunities increased for workers.
Land policy also reflected the attempts of the colonial government to attract workers. The colonial governments attempted to differentiate between the older settled workers and newly-arrived indentured workers. Those who had been on the island were offered land so they would not leave the sugar estates. Those who returned to the island where they had first indentured were not always hired because, as seen in the case of British Guiana, planters were reluctant to “take on re-indentured Indians since these knew the ropes.”Footnote 84
There is no doubt that further complexities developed when the presence of Indian immigrants threatened the competitive edge of the emancipated African workers, and complex animosities developed around differences in race, religion, and ethnicity among oppressed social groups. Yet such competition did not prevent resistance through strikes and protests and everyday actions of absenteeism. While it would be wrong to imply that subaltern agencies would automatically lead to proletarian consciousness in a unidirectional manner, it would be equally wrong to expect that subalterns would accept the dominance of capital and would be subsumed within its fold without resistance. An example might be Bechu Kurmi of Bengal, who described himself as a “bound coolie,” and offered in his series of letters to British Guiana's The Daily Chronicle a radical representation of himself.Footnote 85 Bechu claimed to be a kurmi, a member of the agricultural caste, and a Bengali from Calcutta who was orphaned at an early age.Footnote 86 He received no formal education but was schooled by “a white missionary lady.”Footnote 87 In 1894 the 34-year-old Bechu enlisted for Trinidad but was shipped instead to British Guiana and indentured to the Enmore plantation in East Coast Demerara from December 1894 to February 1897. Yet on arrival, Bechu was found physically unfit for manual labor and was made an assistant driver; later, the deputy manager of the Enmore estate, Mr. Nicholson, allowed Bechu to read newspapers and books.Footnote 88 In his first letter to The Daily Chronicle, dated November 1, 1896, Bechu condemned shootings that had occurred on the Non Pareil plantation on October 13, 1896. Five indentured workers were killed while fifty-nine were wounded. Bechu's continuous castigation of indentured workers’ conditions forced Governor Augustus Hemming to “commute his indentureship in February 1897.”Footnote 89 Left to his own devices, Bechu started writing a series of letters to the same newspaper that exposed the overworking of indentured labor. Bechu wrote that indentured workers worked twelve hours a day, often faced arbitrary fines, and that female workers faced sexual harassment but were subdued by the threat of being shot.Footnote 90 Bechu's letters were so strident that the West India Royal Commission interrogated him. To the commissioners, he elaborated how around early 1897 about 5,000 coolies wanted to return to India, especially those who “have families” in India.Footnote 91 Attachment to the land of birth was such that indentured workers were not willing to be mistreated and quickly sought to return to India. As for Bechu, he was a peripatetic immigrant since he had moved from colony to colony.
Before his arrival to British Guiana, Bechu had traveled to Rangoon and Mandalay.Footnote 92 While Bechu seemed to have atypically exercised his choice to reemigrate, several indentured workers resorted to circular migration in order to avoid confinement on sugar estates and to search for better livelihoods. Circular migration of indentured workers bringing the same workers to similar or different destinations was confirmed in the Protector of Immigrants’ Annual Report:
Most of these had already been at Mauritius; and have come back, either with the object of becoming permanent settlers in the Colony, or with the hope of turning their industry and earnings to a more profitable account than they could in India.Footnote 93
Networks of information had established themselves with the return of many indentured workers.Footnote 94 Soon certain destinations proved to be popular among workers including returnees from Mauritius, many of whom reembarked on journeys to other colonies. For example, Major Pitcher's report of the emigration of “coolies” from northwestern India to plantation economies is revealing:
One Din Muhammad returned from Demerara eighteen months ago, after an absence of fifteen years [from India]; took his wife out with him, and brought her back. Had money, but his wife's illness and death, six months ago, cost him a great deal. Was now going to try his luck in Natal, though he would rather go to Demerara, if only the season were open. Spoke with intense scorn of Hindustan, as being unfit to live in after Demerara. No short-commons there, no famine.
Major Pitcher further adds that,
I drew him out by suggesting that it was very cold, that they could not get fish, and so on, which elicited from him lavish praise of everything and every one connected with Demerara as compared with Hindustan. With him was his son, a boy of five or six, and particularly bright and intelligent. The child had returned from Demerara speaking English, but could now only say a few words, which, however, he seemed very pleased to have an opportunity of using.Footnote 95
While Din Muhammad was one example of a Demerara returnee to India, it has been estimated that about 22 percent of the 451,000 indentured workers who reached Mauritius returned to India for good. According to Geoghegan, “[T]he Colonial Government attributed this fact to the facility of intercourse between India and Mauritius, the short term of engagement, the good wages, enabling the laborers soon to amass a little hoard,…”Footnote 96 Geoghegan further adds that “many of those returning to India returned, it was said, but for a time, and ultimately found their way back to Mauritius.”Footnote 97
Often indentured Indian immigrants became deeply attached to their newfound homes in different colonies. Once they were informed of their actual destination, they were often tragically disappointed. This was the case for an indentured worker called Carpen, who hanged himself in his hut on a sugar estate in Mauritius. The inspector of immigrants explained how Carpen had “been recruited in India under the impression that he was doing so for the West Indies, where he had previously worked under a master to whom he was much attached and to whom he intended to return; and that, on his finding himself at Beau Fond, in Mauritius, he lost his head, and finally destroyed himself.”Footnote 98 Though such statements have been traditionally interpreted as innocent workers being victimized by their employers, an alternative perspective can see this as an example of a worker being denied his choice.
Conclusion
Adam McKeown's influential article of 2004 criticizes Eurocentric perspectives on global migration. His arguments emphasize the sheer volume of intra-Asian migrations, the critical importance of networks influencing migration, and artificial dichotomies of free and unfree migration.Footnote 99 This brief essay follows the same tenor of the argument but with certain major qualifications. First, it establishes that the global moments of conflict within capital and massive flows of labor migration influence the very rhetoric of the migration pattern. Rather than locating the disjuncture between the rhetoric of colonial capital and the liberal anti-imperial historians and radical postcolonial critiques, it identifies a continuity between them. This continuity is reinforced by the belief that workers were ignorant and that the domination of capital was hegemonic. From this perspective, workers’ agency, understood as resistance, was either absent or did not need to be highlighted.
Rather, workers’ mobility across oceans indicated choice. While critically engaging with the argument of resistance, it is clear that the agency of workers could not simply be located within the network of migration on its own. This network of migration operated within a powerful system of global forces of colonial capitalism. Located within the intersections of race, class, and gender, such colonial capitalism sought to create an infrastructure of dominance in extracting the surplus from labor through legally sanctioned economic and, more importantly, extra-economic coercions. Yet such structures of domination were never complete. Rather they were punctured by the contradictions within the global political economy of sugar production and consumption and labor's ability to assert its power to challenge the domination of capital.
Labor challenged the authority of capital at multiple levels. First, in Mauritius, it engaged in circular migration and at times purposeful migration. It operated within the eighteenth century context where there existed slave and labor trades. Its eventual complaints attracted attention and higher-level interventions in the form of Royal Commissions.Footnote 100 While such reports need to be read critically—since investigators often carried their humanitarian selves in their opinions—they became a source for historians to excavate the anger of workers and their assertions against the oppression of colonial capital and its allies. Extant literature rightly points out that Royal Commissions played a role in mitigating competition among various groups of employers over the labor of workers. These reports enable us to understand the wider dynamics of migrations from the Indian Ocean to what many Eurocentric historians, notwithstanding whether they talk about the British or French Atlantic, refer to as the Atlantic World. It is here that workers sought whatever limited options they had to assert their agency and transform the reach of colonial capital and planter Raj. Migration networks among workers within the overarching network of colonial capitalism spanned across the oceans. Boundaries within the oceanic systems did not apply here. Returnees told new stories of opportunities and the resilience of workers both fed into a counterhegemonic information network among workers. India, Trinidad, British Guiana, and Mauritius, disparate locations of peripheral economies, were transformed into integrated networks through the dialectic between the desire of capital to control the spatial and social mobility of labor and the assertion by workers of their agency by exploiting competition between rival colonial employers.
By focusing on the European plantocracy, scholars have tended to homogenize workers and marginalize their agency in terms of resistance and attempts to secure rights. The word “rights” is used here not in the liberal sense of human rights but in the specific sense of being able to exert control over the process of deploying their labor under structural conditions not created by workers themselves. Indeed, the very idea of indentured contracts and the debates around them had their origins in the enlightenment discourse of slavery, specifically trans-Atlantic slavery in the eighteenth century.
While such debates and later historiography provide insights into the structure of domination exercised by colonial capital, recent social science theories also assert that the structures are never complete.Footnote 101 The introduction of the steamship, railway, telegraph, and printing press created the infrastructure for labor mobility and strengthened the process of information gathering by workers. But there is a need to locate the development of such infrastructure for the circulation of labor and for information about laboring conditions against the background of changing social and economic circumstances in India and the Afro-Asian colonial world. In India devastating famines and glaring indigenous social inequalities generated by religious, gender, and caste discrimination acted as the primary trigger for migration. Abroad, the direct colonization of the interior of Africa and emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean and Mauritius created needs for new labor. In China the penetration of colonial capital through the lucrative opium trade and acquisition of informal control over territories also generated the need for Indian labor for projects of colonial capital. The dynamic interactions between the oppressive situation at home and demands for new labor abroad changed the very nature of the global movement of workers across oceans. Indeed, employers in different corners of the colonial world competed to recruit Indian workers and sought to tie them to their respective plantations and other civilian projects. Yet the workers also realized the wide nature of the labor market and defied managerial dictates.
Thus, labor mobility was not simply a reflection of the docility of indentured labor to the designs of capital, but it was also symptomatic of their resistance to the attempt to arrest the process of mobility itself and of their choice to reemigrate. In other words, indentured labor in the period between 1834 and 1925 was not a mute victim of colonial capitalism. Indentured workers actively used colonial legal architecture and mobility of infrastructure to advance their interests and sharpen their survival strategies.
