In Search of our ancestors: Part One

People like me

My search as an Indian living abroad for ancestors forgotten and erased from our living history but whose descendants in Europe were a constant reminder, began in Amsterdam in 1996 when I arrived to join the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT). I was appalled by the whiteness of the so-called technical staff who in Dutch/KIT speak were those who were meant to be the subject specialists, had post graduate and PhD degrees, taught or trained, did commissioned policy-oriented research and were sent on assignments abroad to disseminate their superior knowledge. They were sort of the elite of KIT although this was never mentioned given that the Dutch prided themselves on their liberal, democratic culture. I was surprised at the paucity of black and brown faces among this so-called elite more so because I had come from the UK where I spent some years and where the empire had begun to strike back in that there were many black and brown professionals in the institutions where I was.

 

There were some brown and black people mainly among the admin staff at KIT and among them were three people who looked like me. They told me that their ancestors came from Suriname. At that point I was so ignorant of world geography and European colonisation of the other except of course British colonialism, that I had to look up Suriname on the map and the rest of the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean. Talking to my Surinamese colleagues didn’t really yield much information about their ancestry and how they happened to be from Suriname but I realised that one of them spoke a smattering of Hindi. Their names sounded vaguely Indian but not quite. At the University of Sussex in the UK where I spent all those years there were many South Africans who looked like Indians but were not. But somehow because South Africa was more familiar having been a British colony and because Gandhi started his political work there, I was aware that people from India had been transported as labour to the country. I had heard about the system of indentured labour introduced by the British in the nineteenth century but did not know enough about it. So who were these Suriname Hindustanis as the Indian population of Suriname were called in The Netherlands and how come their ancestors migrated to Suriname when it was not a British but Dutch colony?

 

Twenty-eight years after my arrival in Amsterdam I finally got the opportunity to find out more about the ancestry of the Surinamese Indians and with it the story of indentured labour.  Ragna a young friend from Amsterdam with Surinamese Indian heritage told me early in 2024 that she was doing a book on her Surinamese ancestry both personal and political for the fifty-year celebration of Surinamese independence in 2025 and would be visiting Kolkata. This conversation was on the fringes of her birthday party and was ever so brief but I leapt at the chance to learn more about the Surinamese Indians and the story of a generation of Indians  who in the nineteenth century were sent by the British as workers all over the globe. I offered to help her especially for the Kolkata bit of the journey but it became much more than that;  it became a wonderful collaboration through which I discovered a whole chapter of our history that for me and many of my friends in India was unknown.

 

 

What this blog is about

This blog or rather should I call it a long read is in two parts. 

 

This first part takes you on a journey to the nineteenth century when India was a British colony and Britain was in the process like other European powers, the Dutch and the French, of ‘empire’ building and  setting up colonies across Africa and Asia. This inaugurated the capitalist world-economy which introduced industrial agriculture and large-scale cash cropping even as it refashioned political economies to keep in pace with the changes in production. What was in short supply in the initial phase of capitalist expansion was labour. Slavery had hitherto provided the labour to run sugar plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean making the colonising countries very rich but slavery was abolished in the main slave owning countries in Europe between 1834 and 1863 and in the US in 1865. Britain initiated the indentured labour scheme to replace slaves by giving the labourers a contract which stipulated among other terms the period (generally five years but varied), the wages and other ‘benefits’. Between 1838 and 1917 a total of 1.3 million Indians were shipped as indentured labour from India to different parts of the globe. Britain also ‘loaned’ labourers to the Dutch and French for their colonies which is how Indians went to Suriname and became Suriname Hindustanis that we know. The first part relates what happened to the indentured labour in migration.

 

The second part follows Ragna’s journey in India in search of her foremothers. We retraced what we think is the trajectory of these women’s journey from the port in Calcutta from where they were shipped to Suriname to the villages mentioned in their documents which were a century old. This section will be published in August 2025.

 

The worker bees of imperial capital: the girmitiyas, jahajins and coolies

 

The first step in the journey of discovering who these ancestors were was research. I did what I know best which is to put together an extensive reading list helped by friends in India. The historiography of indentured labour is intensely political as is all history writing about our colonial past especially about the nineteenth century. A great deal of this history has been about high policy, the administration of the system and its merits and the benefit for Indians and the indentured. It is in recent decades that a more critical history from the perspective of the experience of indenture is being written which does not treat the subject either as an appendage of British imperial or Indian colonial history. It focuses on the experience of indenture by using very different sources from earlier history writing to construct a history from below. This has been made possible both because postcolonial  history writing has come of age but also because it is now the descendants of the indentured who are leading this research. ‘In this perspective, both sahibs and the subalterns and victors and the vanquished find a place at the historian’s table’ (Hassankhan & Lal 2014:9). Navigating the political fault lines I made a deliberate choice to use references from these scholars to piece together my own understanding of the experience of indenture.

 

Who were the girmitiyas, jahajins and coolies?

The sending out of indentured labour from India to different parts of the world under colonial rule in the nineteenth century was one of India’s largest migrations to date (Mukherjee 2024). A total of 1.3 million people were sent out between 1834-1917. A third of the indentured went to Mauritius, another third to the Caribbean (including Suriname), and the remaining to South Africa, east Africa, Malaysia and Fiji. By 1910 seventy-two per cent of the population of Mauritius was Indian. The term Girmitiya comes from the Hindi adaptation of the term agreement that labourers had to sign on being hired and shipped abroad. Indentured labourers were also nicknamed Jahajin ( the Hindi and Bengali term for ships is Jahaj) because they were transported by ship. The term coolie coined by Portuguese merchants in the 16^th century from the Tamil word kuli meaning wages, was then passed on to other European traders who vied to control the lucrative trade on the Coromandel coast of India (Bahadur 2016:xx). Later it was used as a pejorative by Europeans to describe the non-European workers transported across the globe. 

 

The origin of this system of labour export lies in the history of slavery. The girmitiya system commenced in 1838 within four years of the abolition of slavery in Britain when the first labourers were sent to Mauritius and ended around 1917. Slavery was abolished in the main slave owning countries in Europe between 1834 and 1863 and in the US in 1865. Britain abolished slavery in 1834, France in 1848 and the Netherlands in 1863. The end of slavery ended the system of free labour available for the plantations in the colonies. Indentured labour from India was hired to compensate the loss of labour. In short the replacement of slaves with indentured labour made it possible to keep the plantations running and profitable. By replacing a labour system dependant on unfree workers (slaves) to a system supposedly of free workers choosing to work under contract was a legal manoeuvre that kept the colonial capitalist system within the limits of the law while allowing it to make large profits from ‘near slave’ labour. 

Three government regulated ports in India were used for the transport of indentured labourers namely, Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Some emigrants were shipped illegally from Pondicherry which at that time was a French possession. The emigrants came from diverse regions in India: from tribal regions of Eastern India, Bihar, Northwest Provinces (present day Uttar Pradesh), Madras Presidency and some from western India. 

Labour in the era of global capitalist expansion

The nineteenth century was an era of mass migration and human displacement not unlike what we are witnessing today. This century was also witness to a unique blend of commercial interests and political power which then resulted in the setting up of ‘empire’ and creation of colonies across Africa and Asia, primarily by the industrializing European powers—the Dutch, French and British. Both these essential markers of the nineteenth century—large scale migration and imperialist expansion had an interdependent causal relationship, each one facilitating the advancement of the other. This was followed by a new era of the capitalist world-economy which introduced industrial agriculture and large-scale cash cropping while re-fashioning political economies to keep in pace with the changes in production (Mishra 2009). As a result social ties were rent and rearranged and people moved from areas of supply to areas of demand.

At the same time and by the mid nineteenth century British agrarian and industrial policies had begun to impact the political economy of India. In the agriculture sector the land policies brought in since the late eighteenth century to extort higher and higher revenue for the British had pauperized the peasantry (Hoefte 1987; Bagchi 1976; Kumar 2014).  Forced cultivation of opium and indigo instead of food crops in the areas from which most of the indentured migrants were recruited led to widespread hunger and precarity. The alliance between the Indian landed elite (a class partly created by these policies) and the British impoverished the peasants and led to centuries of colonisation (Kumar 2014). The de-industrialisation that resulted from the destruction of textile and other related industries in India to finance the industrial revolution in England and to replace the artisanal production with imported factory goods, led to widespread unemployment. These momentous changes fuelled the emigration of people in search of work to support their families back home in India and to build a better life.

The expansion of the capitalist world economy under imperialism necessitated a colossal demand for labour, especially for labour intensive plantation work, which could not be done by the locally available labour force in the regions of expansion (Mishra 2009; Kumar 2017). The problem of labour scarcity became critical with the abolition of slavery throughout the empire. The plantation owners were under protection by their government which assured them a supply of labour in the immediate aftermath of abolition through the internship system which aimed to keep ex-slaves tied to the plantations for a period but because of the understandable refusal by many freed slaves to abide by this system the need to import labour became an urgent necessity. The plantation owners preferred a system whereby labourers would be under contract to work for a specified period. India was seen as having an inexhaustible pool of labour and through the indentured system the British not only sent Indian labourers to their own colonies to work on plantations but also loaned labourers to the Dutch and French for their colonies. The ancestors of Suriname Hindustanis were British subjects loaned to the Dutch under a treaty of agreement between them in 1872. The term Hindustan refers to the geographical area rather than the religion; among the migrants were Hindus and Muslims who comprised 18 per cent of the indentured (Hassankhan 2016:7). 

By setting up of the indentured system and transporting workers across the globe in the nineteenth and early twentieth century the British government emerged as the largest global thikedar of labour the world has ever known. I am using the term thikedar not only in its literal meaning in Bengali as a contractor or agent but in its pejorative sense that we also use  to mean a sly and dishonest broker lacking compassion.

The system and the experience of indenture

While piecing together the experience of the indentured from the work of scholars I spent a lot of time  trying to be objective, to believe that there was a well-functioning regulatory system safeguarding the migrant workers from exploitation.

 

However, the more I read the angrier I got at the appalling system of labour which pretended because it was contracted to be different from slavery but was nevertheless coercive, racist and just plain abusive. Plantation owners simply transferred their attitude to slaves onto their treatment of indentured labour and resented that payments had to be made penalising and cutting wages at the slightest hint of non-compliance. The system made sure that labourers were more or less chained to the plantation for which they were hired and obstructed in every way possible, legally and otherwise, their movement. I am going to detail some of the appalling practices of labour control, unfair and dishonest wage payments and non-payment, and  cruel treatment of workers that was prevalent in the colonies to assert physical and moral domination by the European plantation owners and authorities over their labour.

 

Indenture as labour regime. The contract given to labourers stipulating the wages and other entitlements backed by a regulatory system to manage worker-plantation owner relations gave this labour regime the air of respectability differentiating it from slavery that was unfree and coerced. However, how free were the workers and what power did they have to negotiate the worker-employer relations. Instead of a superficial comparison between slavery and indenture labour on the contract-coercion scale it is more fruitful to look at the wider labour regimen and its characteristics, namely servitude,  to understand the lived experience of indenture. 

 

Servitude is a specific labour regimen characterised by absolute powerlessness and lack of freedom of the labour. The only concern of servitude is to extract the maximum from the labour and therefore the core of servitude lies in labour coercive strategies and in limiting the deliberative sphere of the labourers (choice, opportunities for work , remunerations and so forth) for the benefit of the master. It is a labour regimen rendering labour powerless and without freedom. Slavery can be categorized as a form of servitude (Mishra 2009). If we then look at the indentured experience we find that employers built a system to force work out of the workforce through a structure of punishment and coercion placing them effectively in servitude by curtailing their possible mobility and economic independence. At the core of the freedom-unfreedom discussion is the question of power and by denying labour both these freedoms employers rendered indentured labour, despite their contracts, powerless. 

Recruitment.  When the importation of Indian labourers under indenture system began, it was carried out through informal networks of recruiters in localities. However, very soon it attracted the attention of the colonial authorities primarily for two reasons: first, an effective recruitment system was essential for securing the required supply of labourers and second, the malpractices associated with recruitment such as kidnapping, deception, etc. earned an ill repute for the indenture system. A well-structured and formal system of recruitment was devised placing recruitment operations with the formally appointed recruiting agents, and sub-agents across the regions and localities and verifying agencies were placed at every stage from the district level to the port of embarkation (Mishra 2009). But because this well-ordered system was designed to regulate a highly lucrative trade in people it adapted to the needs of the profit chain which meant that recruitment practices remained extortionist, deceptive and cruel.

The decision to migrate was never entirely voluntary because it was taken in a context of structural coercion in which growing economic dispossession and indebtedness among the rural proletariat was key. This explains why the majority of emigrants were from the middle and some higher castes whose land and livelihoods were at stake. Caste-based oppression was more a factor for the lower castes as for example Kalua in the Sea of Poppies. Young able-bodied men capable of working in the fields were mainly targeted by the agents. The authorities discouraged upper caste men, especially Brahmins, from recruiting as they were not used to working in the fields.  The system of indentured labour from India was a form of forced migration (Kumar 2014).

 

Although primarily male the migration to the colonies was also undertaken by women and not just married women accompanying husbands but also by single women. The colonial government encouraged female migration to maintain the gender balance and dynamics of the indentured population. The Indian Emigration Act of 1864, for example, provided a hard and fast rule for the fulfilment of a 40 per cent quota of women per ship sailing to the colonies although this was never achieved.  Scholarship on indenture particularly women indentured suggests that for some women at least, indenture offered a survival strategy, or opportunities for an autonomous life. Since it was harder to recruit women than men the incentive for female recruitment was higher resulting in kidnapping, deception and extortion. However,  there is also evidence of women deciding for themselves to migrate in the face of opposition from family and male guardians.

Detention as physical domination. As soon as the migrants landed in the colonies their lives were taken over by the plantations that had hired them.  The first experience was of the loss of the freedom of movement; they were for all purposes incarcerated in the plantations. Besides the surveillance by the plantation preventing labourers from leaving the plantation, there were regulations to control labour movement. Detailing the experiences for indentured experience in Mauritius Mishra (2009) shows that the Vagrancy Regulation Act was used in the colonies as a method of labour control. Labourers found outside the plantation were defined as vagrant and arrested for crimes such as visiting relatives, or for visits to the magistrate or Protector of immigration to submit petitions on their grievances. Labourers who had finished their contracts were prevented from finding alternatives other than plantation work by the use of the Act to arrest them. 

In the 1850s those charged with vagrancy spiked in Mauritius; It coincided with many labourers completing their term. This led to the promulgation of Ordinance 31 in 1867. Labourers were expected to carry a ticket with them which specified which territory or district they belonged to. The ordinance stipulated that besides the ticket it was now necessary to carry passes from the Police which required seven days to obtain. This was practically impossible since those completing contracts had to look for work and obtain the ticket and pass from different authorities located at opposite ends of the island. Failure to show these passes when outside the plantation led to arrest after which they were either sent back to the original employer or to the vagrant depot where they were employed in public works at a minimal rate. In other words the authorities and owners tried to make sure that the labourers stayed with the employer and signed yet another contract. 

Penalties for vagrancy were excessively severe, and often without warrant of law so much so that the Indian government objected to the powers given to the police to arrest labourers without warrants on suspicion of vagrancy citing the cases of false convictions of Indians as vagrants. These methods of labour control existed in all the British colonies and was not specific to Mauritius. In Suriname too which was a Dutch colony labourers were not allowed to leave the plantation without permission. There was a system of passes not unlike the system in British colonies. As with the case in Mauritius here too it was a catch 22 which meant that the workers had to travel distances in order to get the pass but could be arrested for not having the pass on them (Hassankhan 2014).

The real motives of such severe anti-vagrancy legislations were the planters’ desperation to ensure the availability of labourers at low wages in post 1860s period when not only the fortunes of the sugar economy began to sink but many labourers, especially in Mauritius the earliest labour colony, also started moving out looking for new prospects. These harsh strategies of labour control can be attributed to the racist attitude of the colonial administrators and planters towards the Indian labourers that they were layabouts and good for nothing and needed controlling. The severe physical confinement faced by indentured labour has led Hassankhan & Lal (2014) to conclude that although indenture labour was not life imprisonment it was certainly temporary detention.

Economic unfreedom as physical domination. Of all the injustices suffered by the migrants the cruellest was that they were not paid their rightful wages. The labourers had migrated in the hope of earning a living, supporting families back home and bettering their lives but what they faced on the plantations was deprivation and many could not make ends meet. 

By the time migrants arrived in the colonies they had already spent the advance of six months’ salary paid to them at the time of recruitment on various items related to the contract and to the journey:  to the recruiter for his fees, to other people for embarkation and buying utensils and other essentials for the voyage. Add to this that the families of young migrants often encouraged them to sign contracts so that they could pay off family debts. That this was not uncommon is seen in Ghose’s Sea of Poppies when Deeti is told by one of the agents to sell her sons to relieve her debt burden since her opium crop had failed. On arrival the migrants had to survive only on the food rations received from their place of work since they had already received six-months wages. This also meant that migrants got into debt because they borrowed money at high interest rates. 

The wage rates that were promised seemed high, higher than in India and is often cited by scholars to point out the benefits of indentured migration. In reality the wages did not increase over the whole period of almost eighty years. If there were occasional increases they were short-lived and wages even decreased on several occasions with the sinking fortunes of the sugar economy (Mishra 2009). Thus the immigrants actually received wages on diminishing rates. 

 

In Suriname where the actual average daily wages were lower every year than the minimum daily wages as formulated in the contract . Soon after the importation of Indian indenture in Suriname, the planters decided to introduce task-work without the prior consent of the labourers. This meant that instead of a daily wage the labourers were to undertake a stipulated number of tasks and their wages were attached to the task rather than their labour per day; inability to undertake all the tasks stipulated meant that their wage per day was abysmally low. The labourers then had to survive on the food rations they were given since they were not earning enough to feed themselves. In Suriname too there was a decrease in wages which the authorities in Suriname lied about when the British commissioners came on inspections (Hassankhan 2014).

In Suriname the fact that the actual average daily wages were lower every year than the minimum daily wages as formulated in the contract was shocking. But even more tragic was that the government estimated expenses for food alone was not met by the wages labourers received. This meant that for the first years of indentured labour in Suriname, male and female, earned less than the absolute minimum to survive; that for the whole period the average annual wages of female labourers was lower than the minimum needs for food as calculated at the beginning of migration period in Suriname (Hassankhan 2014).

A related injustice was the docking of wages by the owners at the slightest pretext or paying less by changing the rules of the game as was done in Suriname where the system of payment changed from a minimum wage per day to payment by tasks that could not be done in a day. It was common practice in the British colonies to deduct wages in two ways. The first deduction was for the return passage, security for good conduct and possible repatriation if it became necessary. Although this accumulated deduction was to be refunded to the labourers it never was. A second form of deduction and one that caused the most grievance was the ‘double cut’ or deduction of two days of wages for an absence of each day, whatever the reasons might be for such absence. Planters used every possible excuse to defer the payment of wages in cash to the labourers.

Wage deductions and non-payment of wages had more to do with the attitude of the planters than scarcity of money who used it as a form of labour control. As labourers got more and more indebted they often had no option but to re-indenture themselves. Disputes over non-payment of wages were brought before the courts but as with the other grievances brought by labourers these too were unsuccessful because of the connivance between the magistrates and planters. It was also racism since the word of a labourer was less trustworthy than that of  a plantation owner.

In the early years of indenture there were occasions when the Indian government suspended labour migration to specific colonies including Suriname because the health situation was so bad that there was high loss of lives (Hassankhan 2014). Since planters were responsible for paying for treatment for the labourers they ignored the situation of poor health. The lack of health facilities combined with the fact that labourers were not earning enough to feed themselves caused a catastrophic situation not once but on several occasions. 

The foremothers: gendered experience of indenture

The experience of indenture was gendered; women experienced not only class and race oppression but experienced it through a prism of patriarchal oppression. Women were not recruited for their labour power but to tie men to the plantations. The sexual quality of indenture dominated almost every description of their role in the plantations.

The women who migrated fell into four social categories: wives of emigrants; impoverished and unsupported widows; married women who had been socially ostracized for absconding or infidelity, or who had been turned out by their husbands; and women regarded as prostitutes, which essentially meant indigent poor women, estranged from their families and without any other means of support (Kumar 2017). Many single women, widows and indigent poor women, as for example Deeti in Sea of Poppies, saw in migration a way to escape their near impossible lives and to be able to earn a living (Ghose 2008). Men migrated internally during lean seasons in agriculture but women  migrants were unlikely to have experienced migration. Also, this migration would have been totally unfamiliar given the distances by sea, the dangers of sexual assault and rape on board the ship; the hunger and finally the kind of work they were given on arrival. Many single women were married off or formed partnerships in the depots in Calcutta where they were kept before boarding the ship as this was seen as being safer than travelling alone. 

During the voyage women were constantly under threat of being sexually assaulted by the ship staff although there were strict rules forbidding ship staff from approaching women migrants. The ship’s doctor who was mainly responsible for reporting on the safety of the passengers was often the worst offender. But women were never just victims as the records show; they gave testimonies to the Officer of Immigration at the port they landed, the officer in charge of reporting  about the journey; and they fought back during the journey. Whereas the ship staff and others responsible for the migrants labelled the women as mere sluts the archives give glimpses of real women and their experiences: on their deathbeds, giving birth, losing children, going mad, being driven to suicide, stowing away, engaged in infanticide, rejecting or being rejected by husbands, crying and cursing. Clearly the mental and physical toll on their health drove them to near breaking point (Bahadur 2013).

The life of women on the plantations was hard with field work being mandatory for most except the wives of skilled workers. Women’s wages were two-thirds of that of men which only a few could earn. Where workers were paid by task as in Suriname women’s tasks were calculated as two-thirds of male tasks making it even more difficult for women to earn the amount stipulated in their contracts. Work in the plantations followed a sexual division of labour; men’s tasks were designated as heavy and paid more than women’s tasks like weeding which was considered ‘light’ work and paid less (Hoefte 1987) . This was justified on the basis that men were the bread winners and women dependants. However, evidence shows that the income of the wife was essential for family survival. Women had a double day waking up in the early hours to cook and clean before leaving for work and then doing everything needed for household survival in the evening on their return from work. Women worked throughout their pregnancy till they were about to give birth and returned to work as soon as they could because otherwise their wages and food rations would be cut. 

The sexual economy in the plantations was shaped by the fact that there were far fewer women as compared to men. Most transports to the colonies failed to fulfil the forty per cent quota stipulated by law. Consequently  life on the plantations was fraught with sexual jealousy, exploitation of women, wife murders and suicide. In Suriname, as Hoefte shows, a single man arriving on the plantation was given a room and a woman to share it with. If he did not like the woman he gave her to another man who might fancy her; the woman was an exchange commodity between men. She also shows that overseers and other plantation employees exercised their power to form liaisons with women labourers. The shortage of women gave rise to partial polyandry with consequent tensions and jealousies. The high rates of violence against women including wife murders the occurrence of which was six to seven times higher than what it was in India, was partially due to men’s fear of losing control over women. In her book Coolie Woman Gaiutra Bahadur seems to link the violence of migration and its impact on the masculinities of Indian labourers and the present high incidence of crimes against women by their partners in Guyana today (Bahadur 2013/16).

Resistance

Many indentured labourers carried with them the memory and tradition of the peasant movements and rebellions that occurred throughout the nineteenth century in colonial India as the peasantry protested against the injustices they faced. In the colonies the labourers were in detention in their plantations and as such major collective resistance and revolts were dangerous and cost lives. Despite this in all the colonies there were sporadic acts of collective resistance.  Hassankhan (2014:19) shows that acts of violent, collective resistance broke out in the plantations in Suriname from time to time; the armed clashes of  1884, 1891, and 1902 are best known. However, the most common forms of resistance were covert and passive. In the face of overwhelming power the labourers resorted to a politics of accommodation biding time till their contracts expired and they could start a new life outside the plantation. Among the many covert forms of passive resistance most commonly adopted were desertion despite the high risk of being found and detained; suicide was also common as people lost hope which continues to be high today; feigning illness and absenting themselves from work; doing things incorrectly or going slow at work; and acts of arson and sabotage. 

This account of resistance would be incomplete without a mention of women who bore the brunt of hardships but were defiant, courageous and independent. Most frequent way of resisting the planter regime was through acts of non-cooperation. They verbally and physically assaulted plantation personnel; sabotaged plants and tools and carried out other subversive acts. Researching women employed as housemaids in the Natal, Hiralal (2014) shows that although resistance as an individual living in close quarters with the employer’s family was difficult, women nevertheless found ways to defy their employers. They feigned illness, sought legal recourse; lodged complaints and asserted their labour rights. Although appealing to the law did not always bring the desired result it was a way of harassing the employer. However, the right of appeal to the Protector or officer-in-charge of immigration which these women used extensively to assert their rights, was a double-edged sword for women. On the one hand it provided some redress but on the other it was for women a euphemism for a system of legislative imprisonment (Carter 2014). As for example, when women sought redress against their own men they were constrained by the colonial Indian marriage laws which placed women under the authority of their husbands.

Return

Very few migrants returned to their homeland, about 21 per cent, although this figure varied from country to country (Lall 1998; Kumar 2017). Researchers cite several reasons for this including the fact that in the first five years of their contract many had not earned enough to accumulate savings and were ashamed to return just as poor as when they left (Hoefte 1987). However, the realistic explanation probably is that having lived and worked in the country of migration for five- or ten-years ties with the homeland weakened and roots in the new country strengthened. Men and women got married often across caste lines, had children and many were able to find other livelihoods once their contracts ended including as agriculturists in their new home. Life happened, lives that would have been inexplicable to those back home. In Suriname the labourers could get agricultural land if they gave up the right of return a privilege denied to women whose access to land was through their relationship with a man. There is evidence to show that indentured labourers tried to keep in touch by sending letters (dictated to someone literate), sending money through the post and with returnees (Kumar 2017).

 

Among the returnees some came back with considerable savings. Most of those who had done well did so after their contract ended and they found other livelihoods or had held positions as sirdars in the plantation and earned more. On returning people had to spend money to get back their caste status which some could not afford. Many re-indentured and returned to the county of migration or elsewhere. Some returnees especially those who had done well became recruiting agents for the plantations which for the British government was a huge advantage since they spoke in positive terms about indenture labour migration.  

 

Capitalist modernity: Good people doing bad things

What puzzled me while I was researching the experience of indenture labour was how good people in the colonial administration and as well the liberal institutions set up to regulate this form of labour migration in the ultimate analysis not only failed to protect the labourers but came out squarely on the side of the plantation owners delivering labourers into servitude far, far away from home. ‘How did avowedly good people live with doing bad things?’ asks Satia in her book Time’s Monster (cited by Amitav Ghose in his book Wild Things 2025). Reviewing Satia’s book Ghose poses his own question ‘how did conscientious British officials convince themselves that they had to stand by and let millions of Indians die of hunger in famines that were largely caused by colonial policies?’ The puzzle of good people and liberal institutions ultimately colluding with capital to keep labourers in servitude begins to make a distorted kind of sense when we see what was at stake: imperial expansion achieved through violence committed abroad in the colonies. This was central to the making of colonial modernity which allowed conscientious British officials and their liberal institutions to stand by while millions died for example in the Great Bengal famine in 1943 because redistributing food was unthinkable as it interfered with the free market. The setting up of systems to regulate labour and capital administered by British officials made the indenture labour regime look rational and modern and the British government a good overseer of relations. The government emerged as a just arbiter on the side of labour as long as the interests of capital were not threatened. Capitalist modernity framed the injustice and suffering of labourers as a necessity in order to make the labourers fit for the civilised world. Indenture labour was seen as a ‘rightful engine’ for the coolies enabling them to realise the gains from the system and improve their lot (Mishra 2009: 248).

 

Fast forward to today when the genocide in Gaza is being criticised by European governments but the demand by protestors to stop arms sales to Israel has been denied so far on the grounds that present arms contracts cannot be violated. 

 

 

References

 

Bahadur, Gaiutra 2013. Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture. Hurst & Company: London.

Carter, Marina 2014. Resistance and Women Migrants to Mauritius under the Indenture System. In Maurits S. Hassankhan, Brij V. Lal and Doug Munro (ed) 2014. Resistance and Indian indenture experience: Comparative Perspectives. Manohar Publishers, New Delhi.

Choeni, Chan E.S. 2021. From Suriname to India: The Remigration of Hindostanis, 1878-1921. Indenture Papers: Studies on Girmitiyas.

Ghose, A., 2008. Sea of Poppies. John Murray: London.

Ghose, A., 2025. Priya Satia’s Time’s Monster. In Amitav Ghosh Wild Fictions: Essays, Chapter 23. Fourth Estate: New Delhi.

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