Indian Indentured Labour

Misha Glenny and guests discuss how, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, sugar planters recruited workers from India to replace or compete with their formerly enslaved labourers. Over the next 90 years, more than a million people in India travelled under five year contracts of indenture across the empire from Guyana to Trinidad to Mauritius and Fiji and colonies in between. These indentured labourers were to share vivid accounts of deception and abuse, especially in the early decades. From the outset there were critics and opposition gained pace with Gandhi and others in South Africa arguing the system was close to slavery and calling for the Indian government to stop the practice, which was to happen in 1917 with the last shipments of people in the 1920s. Meanwhile, rather than return after their contracts, a section of indentured labourers stayed where they were for their own reasons, negotiating their new identities alongside formerly enslaved people and the planter culture in a new Indian diaspora. With Purba Hossain Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York Neha Hui Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Reading And Clem Seecharan Emeritus Professor of History at London Metropolitan University Produced by Simon Tillotson Reading list: Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Hurst and Co., 2013) Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834-1874 (Oxford University Press, 1995) Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (Anthem Press, 2002) Jonathan Connolly, Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press, 2024) Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and David Dabydeen (eds.), The Other Windrush: Legacies of Indenture in Britain's Caribbean Empire (Pluto Books, 2021) Neha Hui and Uma S. Kambhampati, ‘Between unfreedoms: The role of caste in decisions to repatriate among indentured workers’ (The Economic History Review 75:2, 2022) Neha Hui and Uma Kambhampati, ‘The political economy of Indian indentured labor in the nineteenth century (Journal of the History of Economic Thought 47:2, 2025) Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) Ashutosh Kumar, Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) Brij V. Lal, Girmitiyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians (Fiji Institute of Applied Studies, 2004) Brij V. Lal, ‘Kunti’s Cry: Indentured Women on Fiji Plantations’ (Indian Economic & Social History Review 22:1, 1985) Andrea Major, ‘“Hill Coolies”: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination, 1836–38’ (South Asian Studies 33:1, 2017) Basdeo Mangru, Indenture and Abolition: Sacrifice and Survival on the Guyanese Sugar Plantation (TSAR, 1993) Kalathmika Natarajan, Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67 (Oxford University Press, 2026) Clem Seecharan, 'Tiger in the Stars': The Anatomy of Indian Achievement in British Guiana, 1919-29 (Macmillan, 1997) Clem Seecharan, Finding Myself: Essays on Race, Politics and Culture (Peepal Tree Press, 2015) S. Sen, ‘Indentured labour from India in the age of empire’ (Social Scientist, 44:1/2, 2016) Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (Oxford University Press, 1974) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description, wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, plantation owners turned to Indian indentured labour, taking more than a million people to colonies from Guyana, to Mauritius, to the Caribbean and beyond. Critics, Gandhi amongst them later on, said this was little more than slavery in disguise and argued for abolition, which happened,

• 2:28Speaker 05

  but not until 1917. And there could be deception and abuse, especially in the early decades. But since many, especially from disadvantaged castes, chose to stay rather than return to India when their contracts expired, then questions about the experience of different peoples in different colonies became more nuanced. Well, with me to discuss this period of Indian indentured labour are Purba Hussain, lecturer in modern history at the University of York, Neha Hui, associate professor in economics at the University of Reading, and Clem Sitaran, emeritus professor of history at London Metropolitan University.

• 3:13Speaker 05

  And Clem, it's to you I turn to first. In 1833, give us a sense of how entwined slavery, sugar and the British Empire were.

• 3:25Speaker 06

  Well, there was a very long history of that and some scholars have referred to it as the sugar-slave plantation complex. Certainly in the Caribbean, the sugar industry with slave labour was the dominant factor in the economic development of the Caribbean islands. So it was crucial. In fact, when you think of sugar in the Caribbean, you think of sugar and slavery. And very often the expression bitter sugar crops up because I think it summarizes the experience under slavery as well as, to an extent,

• 4:09Speaker 06

  certainly in the early stages of indent. Ship which came after the enslavement of Africans.

• 4:17Speaker 05

  So what happened to the former enslaved people? What did they do?

• 4:22Speaker 06

  It varied, Misha. In some islands, like Antigua, for instance, where the possibility of acquiring land was virtually impossible. So very difficult indeed. You didn't even have the so-called apprenticeship system, which existed on other islands or in other colonies in the Caribbean. Because the planters knew that the freed people, the former slaves, the former enslaved, had very few options, very few alternatives, so that their labour was still accessible to the planters.

• 5:00Speaker 06

  But in places like Trinidad and British Cayenne and Suriname in the southern Caribbean, there was a considerable amount of unoccupied land, land that did not belong to the plantations or land that was not used by the plantations. And in those places, the freed people had options to acquire land, as they did in British Cayenne as well as in Trinidad. And it was to those places where people had options and therefore were inclined to leave the plantations after emancipation. It is to those places where that vacuum was left,

• 5:43Speaker 06

  where Indian indentured labour, in fact, other forms of indentured labour, including Madeira and Portuguese indentured labour and Chinese indentured labour.

• 5:53Speaker 05

  So tell us a little bit about the compensation. Who was compensated for the abolition of slavery?

• 6:00Speaker 06

  But certainly not the enslaved or the freed people. The compensation ironically was referred to those who owned the enslaved Africans. And they were being compensated for their property. And enslaved people were not human beings. They were property in the same way, the oxen and the mules.

• 6:23Speaker 05

  And it was huge sums of money, as I understand.

• 6:25Speaker 06

  Well, it was over twenty million pounds, certainly for Caribbean planters. And that was a vast amount of money in its time.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  So Neha Hui, tell us a little bit about this man John Gladstone and what problem he perceived he had once slavery was abolished.

• 6:43Speaker 07

  John Gladstone was a Scottish merchant, a member of Parliament, and the father of future Prime Minister William Gladstone. He was also a slave owner. He had more than 2,500 slaves across nine plantations, and he was one of those people who got the compensation that you were talking about a minute ago. He got over £100,000 in compensation, which was close to £83 million in current money. So, as was mentioned, as Clem mentioned, it isn't like plantation owners like Gladstone lost complete control. So, right after slavery was abolished, a transitional period of apprenticeship was

• 7:25Speaker 07

  instated, where former slaves were required to continue working for their slave owners for a period of up to eight years. However, Gladstone was looking beyond that. He wanted access to a reliable labour force.

• 7:40Speaker 05

  Just if I can butt in there, how much were the former enslaved workers being paid during these apprenticeships?

• 7:49Speaker 07

  So, during the apprenticeships, they were required to provide unpaid labour for up to 45 hours a week. And, yes.

• 7:58Speaker 05

  So, it's not quite the abolition of slavery that we thought it was?

• 8:03Speaker 07

  No, no, definitely, at least not in the initial years. So, yeah, so going back to Gladstone, so Gladstone was very keen to continue having the supply of reliable labour. And so he knew that Mauritius had already started getting a supply of Indian workers from 1834, and he started lobbying the Parliament.

• 8:24Speaker 05

  Yes, so what arguments was he making? And who did he need to persuade in order to introduce this system of indentured labour?

• 8:33Speaker 07

  There were a couple of things, couple of concerns that the plantation owners felt would reduce their profitability. One was, of course, the slavery. Reabolition Act, but then there was another act which was being debated around the same time as indentured labour in the parliament. That was the Sugar Equalisation Act, which Sugar Equalisation Bill, which became an act in eighteen forty six. That act would remove the preferential treatment that British Caribbean sugar had in Great Britain. And they would face competition from slave-produced sugar from Brazil and Cuba. The kind of argument that people like Gladstone was making was they were concerned that these newly freed former slaves would have increased bargaining power.

• 9:17Speaker 07

  And then they were also concerned, as Clem mentioned, because there was abundance of fertile land. These workers would be contained with bounties of nature, was the term that was used. So he argued for a flow of workers from India.

• 9:32Speaker 05

  So, Paldama Hussein, the legislation goes through relatively swiftly. The indentured system is set up and it begins with the Atlas Voyage going from Calcutta to Mauritius in eighteen thirty four. Why does it begin in Calcutta?

• 9:49Speaker 04

  So Calcutta in eighteen thirty three, if you take the year that the Slavery Abolition Act is passed in the British Parliament, Calcutta is a very, very important city already in South Asia. It is a port city, it is a really quite massive port traffic connecting East Asia, China on the one hand, and all the way up to Europe. In the nineteenth century, Calcutta is the capital under the East India Company, later under the British Crown. But also there are multiple important shipping companies and merchant companies based in Calcutta. And in fact, when Gladstone in eighteen thirty six writes to Calcutta-based merchant company where his cousin works to ask if Indian labour is a possible way of bringing labour into the Caribbean and a way of ensuring that sugar production is not stalled.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  They had this conversation that is very focused on what Calcutta can provide. The idea is that the merchant companies based in Calcutta can kind of run the operations at the port city side. But there would be labour recruiters going into different parts of eastern India, into villages and towns and cities, entice people in, in some cases as we know now, kidnap people and bring them to the port.

• 10:59Speaker 05

  So what were the voyages like? What were the conditions that the indentured workers were kept in?

• 11:05Speaker 04

  So the voyages were actually an extremely important part of the indenture experience. And maybe I'll start with the caveat that this changes quite a lot in the eighteen thirties and forties, we see really long voyages with the coming of steelships and much improved steamship engineering in the eighteen eighties and nineties, it does change quite a bit.

• 11:25Speaker 05

  And presumably it's a lot quicker once you've got steam.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  It is a lot quicker, uh, once you get to the end of the nineteenth century, yes. But surprisingly, people's understanding of the ships and the voyages does not change as a complete overhaul. For context, in the eighteen thirties, forties and fifties, if you go from Calcutta to Mauritius, it takes about one and a half months. If you go to Fiji, it takes about four months. If you go to Jamaica, it can take up to five months. It depends on the time of the year and all those other geographical concerns as well. That a large part of becoming an indentured migrant and becoming used to the system of having an overseer, becoming one laborer amongst many and following very particular kind of

• 12:09Speaker 04

  almost the synchronized system of waking up at a particular time, being allowed on deck at a particular time, living with other indentured migrants. Most of the indentured men, women and children were living under the decks, they were allowed up on decks for certain times. There were real concerns with spread of disease because they were living very, very closely together. There were other issues such as sexual harassment of women that was really quite rampant on these ships.

• 12:35Speaker 05

  So Clem, let's focus a bit on Guyana, which became one of the main destinations after Mauritius. What were conditions like for indentured laborers at first when they arrived in Guyana?

• 12:47Speaker 06

  There's some gradation here in terms of the treatment of indentured labors. It's not a uniform thing. And the first indentured labors who were taken to British Guyana arrived there on the fifth of May eighteen thirty eight, even before the final day of the formal end of slavery. So we're dealing here with a society that was still a slave society. And obviously, the attitudes of planters, in spite of the fact that they were facing this potential loss of. Labour, the attitude of planters was still the attitude shaped by being slave masters.

• 13:28Speaker 06

  So I think the the initial experience was quite awful. And it was primarily because of that experience in British Cayenne with the first two ships that arrived there in eighteen thirty eight, that the system was suspended for a number of years. And it was restarted again in the Caribbean until.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  But suspended because the conditions were just so awful.

• 13:54Speaker 06

  The conditions were so awful and there was a high mortality rate among the first batch of indentured labors. And it was restarted again in eighteen forty five. But what is interesting to note here, Misha, is that those freed people of African descent, the former slaves, they understood their bargaining position because British Cayenne was not a developed slave society like Jamaica or Trinidad was not a developed slave society like Jamaica or Barbados. So there was considerable amount of land and the freed people realized that they had

• 14:37Speaker 06

  a bargaining strength, a bargaining advantage because of their access to land. And they started to buy land and to acquire small villages and so on on the periphery of these plantations. But they were very conscious that they could bargain with the planters. In fact, they went on strike in eighteen forty two in British Cayenne and they were able to get an increase in wages. But when those same freed African people went on strike in eighteen forty eight, by then indenture ship had started again. And therefore, those Portuguese and Indian indentured labors were able to undercut the bargaining position of the freed people.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course, the Indian indentured labour was not the only indentured labour system that emerged in the nineteenth century. We saw this particularly with Chinese workers as. Well, Neha, you mentioned before about the lifting of the sugar monopoly in the eighteen forties. So we've got a tension between the colonialist planters and the free traders in Britain at the time. What role does the idea about free labour, how does that fit into this?

• 15:54Speaker 07

  So liberal thinkers of that time saw Indian indentured labour as an uneasy compromise between slavery and free labour. So say, for example, the Indian indentured workers did have sort of macro freedom to travel from one part of British colony, India, to other parts. However, of course, mobility was restricted within the plantation. There were other things that made indentured workers superior, say, for example, a right to a passage back home. Recruitment was at least theoretically free and people were signing a contract to get into the system. Of course, there was a lot of evidence of abuse and coercion there. Indentured workers were paid a wage, it was less than free wage, but they were paid a wage.

• 16:39Speaker 07

  So it was a bit of a compromise. The political economists of that time were uneasy about this, but they didn't explicitly talk about indentured labour. Adam Smith, who of course predated indentured labour, was unambiguously opposed to unfreedom. So in his work Theory of Moral Sentiment, he calls states that had slavery the vilest of all states. And then in Wealth of Nation, he said that unfree labour was inefficient because workers just did not have the incentive to work more. J S Mill also opposed unfree labour on a very deep philosophical ground in his work on liberty. He argued that indentured labour, because it resulted in loss of freedom, actually made contracts meaningless.

• 17:24Speaker 05

  Well, talking about those contracts which they were signing, Portobello, back in India. Who was doing the recruiting and how much did the indentured workers know what they were signing up for? Labour recruiting was done by quite a wide range of people. Back in India, the general idea was that plantation owners in different parts of the British Empire.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  Higher, including British Caribbean, would write to the merchants in Calcutta, some merchant companies, and say, we need this many people at this time. The merchant companies would recruit local Indian men, mostly men, to go into the hinterlands of India. We've talked about Calcutta, but that was not the only port. There were two big ports in southern India as well, Madras and Bombay. So the idea being labour recruiters go into villages and towns and cities in the hinterland and try to argue that indenture system is a really good alternative, especially for people who were already quite used to agricultural labour. That is not actually how it happened. There were people coming back from the Caribbean who had been an indentured migrant

• 18:30Speaker 04

  and they would then have the job of trying to then entice other people to join the indentured migration.

• 18:35Speaker 05

  Their contracts lasted for about five years, is that right?

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Five years, yes. Five years was the standard contract.

• 18:41Speaker 05

  And were they generally, after five years, free to choose what to do next?

• 18:46Speaker 04

  On paper, yes. Actually, no. Sometimes it really depended on whether they had been paid their wages up on time, on whether their wages had been cut because of being ill, for instance, where you couldn't work on certain days. Various plantation colonies used the double cut in wages. So if you miss one day, you get two days wages cut. They were supposed to be paid for the voyage back to their port of origin. Many weren't paid that. Generally, we do know of multiple indentured migrants who did, after they have gone to the Caribbean, to Fiji, to Mauritius, who did take the opportunity of the end of the contract to try to get some of that agency back. We know of multiple people who put in applications to move to a different colony or to a different estate

• 19:31Speaker 04

  because they heard from other indentured migrants that that was slightly better for them or move to colonies would be easier to kind of settle down a bit. But we know so many indentured migrants who had absolutely no idea what they were signing on for. We know of people in the 1830s who was told that they were going to be going on a five-day journey. They ended up going on a two-month journey. Who were told they were going to be abroad for six months. They were abroad for, well, five years in the plantation and then the travel time. As late as 1898, we know of people who thought that land would be visible throughout the journey. Many of these people from the hinterlands have never been on the oceans. So many of them, we know, were expecting really a river.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  A journey to somewhere in or near India.

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• 22:07Speaker 05

  Hello, Misha Glennie here. Did you know you can get episodes of In Our Time 28 days early with a subscription to the BBC website and app? Just head to bbc.com/subscribe to find out more.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  So Clem, back to Guyana, you've mentioned the fact that the agency of the freed enslaved population was initially considerable but then weakened by the introduction of indentured Indian labour. Did that result in ever any coming together of the two communities or were they at daggers drawn as it were over the years?

• 22:49Speaker 06

  Yes, primarily because the indentured labours had access to a considerable amount of land on the Guyana coast because as I said earlier, it wasn't a mature slave society in the way Jamaica and Barbados were, some of the islands, the Leeward Islands and the Windward Islands. So after 1870 in particular, because conditions started to improve, there were reforms, the system that Purba is discussing from the 1830s and 1840s had undergone some reforms from the 1870s to 1880s.

• 23:30Speaker 06

  So increasingly, people were able to, or some people were able to move out of the plantations. So you had an interesting relationship where Indian villages were being created on the Guyana coast, on the periphery of the sugar plantations, in the same way that African villages were created. But in many cases, the Indian villages were substantially more successful because this is a place that's below sea level, tends to be very swampy during the heavy rains. And what happened there was that many people, many indentured labours who came from agricultural

• 24:12Speaker 06

  castes or people who were forced into agriculture because of the penetration of the economies of eastern Utara Pradesh and western Bihar, where many of the caste professions had become defunct. So virtually everybody was thrown onto the land. So even the lowest of castes... People like the Chamars and the Domes and the Dusads, who today, I presume, considered Dalits over the time were seen as Untouchables. Even those people had considerable experience as cultivators, renting land, of course, not owning land, but also as agricultural labourers. So the people who were taken,

• 24:57Speaker 06

  most of the indentured labourers who were taken to British Guyana and Trinidad and Suriname and so on, had considerable agricultural experience. And they were able to maximise the advantages that were thrown up on the Guyana coast on these swampy lands. Because these swampy lands were ideal for the wet rice culture. Whereas in many cases, that militated against the kind of crops that African villagers were cultivating. So there was already a conflict there which had started with the inflow of indentured labourers. And that was magnified by the fact that Indian villages after the 1870s, the 1880s, were emerging all along the coast.

• 25:42Speaker 06

  To the point where when some African villages or bits of land owned by Africans could not be profitably cultivated, some of these lands were bought over by Indians, which exacerbated that discordance that had already emerged.

• 25:58Speaker 05

  Neha, Clem just mentioned there about the caste system and the fact that I presume most of the indentured labourers were Dalits or Untouchables, as they're often referred to. Can you tell us a bit more about what happened to the caste system as people went away? And who was signing up for this?

• 26:20Speaker 07

  Just to clarify, it's not that most people were from Dalit backgrounds, but then a significant number were. I think about a third, that came out from my research. There were people from other castes as well. There were people who were from agricultural castes, there were people from a high caste as well. Now, no matter where they were in the caste hierarchy, in India, their lives would have been structured very much by Gender and caste norms. So just to tell the listeners a little bit about what we mean by the caste system. In India, when the indentured workers came, the system of caste hierarchy would be a very structured system that would deem some people or groups, varnas, superior to others. And people who were at the bottom of the caste hierarchy,

• 27:05Speaker 07

  they would live really, you know, difficult lives of material deprivation, having no access to educational institutions, locked in really bad quality, unskilled labour. People of lower caste were considered so polluting that anyone who, if someone of the higher caste saw them, let alone touched them, they would be defiled. So people lived lives of physical segregation. Inter-dining was not allowed, inter-marriage was not allowed. And the gender norms were particularly difficult for women of higher caste. But then for most people, the caste structure was very strong and prohibitive.

• 27:45Speaker 07

  In the plantation colonies, not that caste completely disappeared, but it didn't exist in the same way. All the workers were working similar jobs. The hierarchy based on occupation couldn't exist anymore. It's not that there was no hierarchy, but the hierarchy was more on racial lines rather than caste lines. Also, you know, coming together in the ships, living together in the sleeping quarters, eating together, meant that these prohibitions on inter-dining or these physical segregation could not be continued. Sex ratio was skewed, which meant that inter-marriage cohabitation was quite common. In fact, in some instances, people of lower caste were considered better options by plantation management because they were less trouble.

• 28:28Speaker 05

  Less able to stand up for their, for their rights.

• 28:31Speaker 07

  Yes, exactly.

• 28:32Speaker 05

  Less, less confident. Clem, you wanted to go in there.

• 28:35Speaker 06

  I, I just want to add to what Neer is saying there because I think that the whole process, as Neer was saying, that it's not just people from the lowest caste. You add people from a broad cross-section of caste, including some minority of Brahmins.

• 28:53Speaker 06

  And Shatriyas who were upper caste people. But you also had a significant amount of people from agricultural castes. If you go to eastern UP today or western Bihar, what is known as the Bhujpur area, Bhujpur speaking area, that Bhujpur culture. The agricultural castes like the Kurmies and the Ahirs and the Kories and so on. These people were among the best agriculturalists in nineteenth century, late nineteenth century eastern UP and western Bihar. And many contemporary writers spoke about the great agricultural skills of the men, even more so of the women.

• 29:37Speaker 06

  But what was interesting about the here is that these people, although they were the best agriculturalists, they owned very little of the land. So when they went to a place like British Khyana or Trinidad or Suriname and found that although they were from the lowest caste and they now had the means to acquire some land, even small parcels of land, that was magical for them. Because in spite of their agricultural skills, in many of these places, there was absolutely no way they could acquire land. Acquiring land was magic. And that explains why, or to a great extent, that explains why,

• 30:19Speaker 06

  let's say, a place like British Khyana, only about twenty-eight, twenty-nine percent of the people returned. I think in Trinidad it was less.

• 30:28Speaker 05

  They stayed on after their contracts.

• 30:30Speaker 06

  Because they were recreating a world.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  But not just recreating a world. They actually had certain advantages which didn't exist in India.

• 30:39Speaker 06

  Of course. And they were able to exploit a variety of niches in the village environments on the periphery of these plantations. So you had a kind of symbiotic relationship between the villages, where people were pursuing their particular skills and developing village communities. But at the same time, during the harvest season, because they had recreated the Indian family as a kind of corporate economic unit, some members would be sent out to the plantations to earn cash during the harvest season on the plantations.

• 31:16Speaker 05

  Neha.

• 31:17Speaker 07

  We've not spoken very much about the experience of women.

• 31:19Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 31:20Speaker 07

  And that is actually quite interesting because on the one hand, yes, there was a lot of sexual harassment, coercion and so on, um, right from the time of recruitment. However, there's also evidence that many of the women who went were women who were, you know, widowed, who were destitutes. Many of the recruitments were from pilgrimage areas where women and men were recruited from, uh, often under false pretense. But then many of these women were in the pilgrimage sites because they were widowed and they were sent uh, away by their families at the death of their husbands. And they lived under extreme conditions of austerity with very little financial support.

• 32:03Speaker 07

  So for some of them, this signing of contract was also an act of agency, given the very limited.

• 32:08Speaker 05

  And a real oppo- real opportunity.

• 32:11Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 32:12Speaker 05

  Clem.

• 32:12Speaker 06

  Yes. Yes, just out of what, um, Neha is saying here. My maternal great grandmother came from a low caste, Paschi, which would be a Dalit caste. And she came from the district of Gonda, which is on the border with Nepal. And she was twenty years old when she was taken to British Cayana in nineteen oh nine, unaccompanied by anybody. And from Bridhlaal's study of Fiji, the late great Professor Bridhlaal, an Indo-Fijian historian. We can extrapolate from that to say that the overwhelming majority of women

• 32:56Speaker 06

  who were taken on the indentured ship, certainly to Fiji and possibly to the Caribbean, were not accompanied by anybody at all, which was a clear indication of what Neha has been talking about, that for some of these women, their husbands had probably died. There were many, they were married at fourteen. Ninety percent of the girls in this area in eastern UP and western Bihar. Were married at the age of fourteen. So many of them would have been widows. Um. Some of them would have been deserted. But what we have to understand also is that there was a culture of migration,

• 33:38Speaker 06

  which had been opened up in the context of the expansion of the British colonialism.

• 33:43Speaker 05

  Paul, but let's pull out a bit now. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, we started seeing more and more voices arguing against the indentured system. And perhaps some of the most important voices came out of South Africa. Can you tell us about what happened in South Africa and why that was so important?

• 34:03Speaker 04

  South Africa was one of the parts of the British Empire that also saw the use of Indian indentured labour. I believe from the middle of the nineteenth century, Indian labourers were also moving as indentured migrants to South Africa, working not just on the field but in a variety of jobs. One of the reasons why South Africa becomes so important to the voices against indenture is because of Gandhi, who, you know, before he started becoming really involved in the Indian independence movement with a lawyer educated in London, for instance, and then based in South Africa, where he realised that there were multiple groups of Indian origin or Indians living in South Africa at the time. People like him who were professionals,

• 34:48Speaker 04

  people who were labourers and people who had specifically gone under the indenture system to work in a particular part of South Africa known as Natal. And Gandhi became very involved in the rights of Indians. And in that case, the rights of Indians, of course, included the rights of indentured migrants and the descendants of indentured migrants. The South African voice then really comes in as as part of the discussion of indentured migrants as part of a wider Indian diaspora. And thinking particularly about how prejudice against people of Indian origin in South Africa, as in many other colonies across the British Empire, prejudice against Indian indentured migrants became part of the prejudice against Indians as a whole. So when Gandhi is back in India, the beginning Of the twentieth century, very end of the nineteenth century.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  This entire discourse and this entire experience he had in South Africa became part of the wider discourse that was coming up out of India at this time, which was that the British imperial system that existed in India needed a complete overhaul, moving later to the asking for complete independence.

• 35:53Speaker 05

  So Clem, if we look at what happens as the movement to abolish the indenture system develops, what happens to the communities afterwards? They are now really part of the local countries that they've that they've moved to. How do they respond to the end of the system?

• 36:16Speaker 06

  The British Guyana case is especially interesting because when indenture ship was abolished, the last indentured were cancelled in April of nineteen twenty. Some middle class Indians in British Guyana launched something called the colonization scheme. It was headed by two very distinguished Indians, a lawyer and a legislator, a man named J A Lokhu, and a man named Dr. William Hughley Wharton, who was actually Indian, who was the first Indian in the Caribbean to graduate in medicine, studied at the University of Edinburgh.

• 36:56Speaker 06

  And they thought that the Indian population was stuck at something like forty two or forty three percent, precisely the time when no more indentured labourers would be taken into the colony. And they felt that that left them very vulnerable. Because unlike Mauritius, and they were citing the case of Mauritius, where the Indian population was already well over sixty, maybe seventy percent, the Mauritian Indians had the instruments to begin to fight for greater political rights. But that in British Guyana, they didn't have that numerical strength to be able to fight in the same way.

• 37:37Speaker 05

  You mean to fight to fight for them with the British? Authorities?

• 37:42Speaker 06

  Yes, with the British authorities.

• 37:43Speaker 05

  Or the other peoples of British Guyana?

• 37:46Speaker 06

  Well, with the British authorities, but that's any kind of political battle of that nature inevitably acquired an ethnic dimension because the Africans were not in favor of the continuation of Indian indentured labor. In fact, they were trying to get more Africans to come in from West Indian islands and from West Africa because they thought that their position in the future, their political and economic position in the future would be gravely undermined if the Indian population was further increased. So that created a big, a big battle there already between, between the two of them.

• 38:26Speaker 05

  So Neha, you have these populations in places as far away as Fiji, British Guyana, Mauritius, South Africa, these Indian populations who remain there after the end of the system. How do they view India itself? I mean, do they feel detached from it or what is their relationship with India?

• 38:48Speaker 07

  The Indian diaspora in the different colonies have a very distinct identity in themselves, which is of course influenced by India, but then it is distinct. Say for example, in Trinidad and Suriname and British Guyana, there is a very strong Indo-Caribbean identity. And in the, during the time of decolonization, these people of Indian background played extremely important roles in every sphere of life, in politics, in literature, and I'm sure Clem will tell you, in sports. It's a

• 39:23Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 39:24Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 39:25Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 39:26Speaker 07

  It's a distinct identity did exist, but then it was influenced by their background in India. There are traces of Indianness in different aspects of their life. For example, maybe the caste system didn't continue to exist in the same way, but then festivals got transferred. So people of Indian origin in the Caribbean celebrate festivals like Pagwa, which is the spring. Festival of Color, which is also known as Holi in India, as well as Diwali, which is the autumn festival of lights. Food has got a very rich influence from India, but then it is, you know, unique and their own. So, yes, the culture did come in, but it's a very distinct identity.

• 40:11Speaker 05

  And how would you sum up the legacy of the Indian indentured system?

• 40:17Speaker 04

  It kind of touches upon everything, economy, politics, culture. This is about eight decades of Indians moving to different parts of the world. As you say, Fiji, in the South Pacific, all the way to Caribbean. One of the biggest legacies, of course, is the creation of these new identities that Neha just told us about, and these new aspects of the Indian diaspora, that many of whom remain quite Indian in the culture, but as you say, also created their own distinct identity as Indo-Mauritians, as Indo-Caribbean. Neha has talked about the population and cultural legacies. To me, one of the bigger legacies, of course, as a historian, thinking about what's happening in India at the time,

• 40:59Speaker 04

  is considering how the abolition of indenture and the discussion and discourse that came out of that snowballed into a very important part of the Indian independence movement and the mass mobilization politics that we know about the Indian independence movement today. Many of it started with people like Gandhi, who were based in India, but also ex-indentured migrants. A very important person being Totaram Sanadhy, who was an Indo-Fijian man who came back to India this time, as many did, as part of the repatriation process, who would go on and giving lectures around different parts of the country in India to try to show his experience of the indenture trade

• 41:41Speaker 04

  and use that as a way to rile people up to speak against the indenture system.

• 41:45Speaker 05

  And Clem, how about you? What do you think the primary legacies of the system are?

• 41:51Speaker 06

  Well, I think, Misha, I've called it a social revolution. And in this respect, I think I was greatly influenced by Professor Bridalal.

• 42:01Speaker 06

  A great impact on me. One of the most important things here was that the caste notions of caste were largely incompatible with the capitalist rationale, the capitalist ethos of the sugar plantations. But the whole process from the depots in Calcutta, the Purba writes about in a very fine book, from there onto the ships, onto the plantations, into the lodges, the barracks, there was no recognition of one's caste background. And therefore, people of necessity started to integrate and to create a new identity.

• 42:43Speaker 06

  In fact, those who travel on the same ship, whether they were Brahmins or Shatriyas or Kurmis or Chamars or people who were seen as being from a very low caste, they had to integrate, they had to work within this framework. And that is why I say the social revolution began there and it continued onto the plantations. In fact, men and women who travelled on the same ship saw themselves as Jahajis or Jahajins, ship brothers and ship sisters. And that relationship became so strong that it was almost forbidden for such people's families to intermarry.

• 43:24Speaker 06

  And I think that that process was magnified by the fact that people were able to retain Islam as well as Hinduism in the Caribbean. Because Muslim people, Brahmins, low caste people, all were in the same, literally in the same boat and on the same plantations. Neha.

• 43:43Speaker 07

  Clem has mentioned a lot about what the pull factors, what kept workers back in British Kana or other colonies. One thing that stopped many people from going back was the notion of Kalapani. So Hinduism imposes caste expulsion on people who have crossed the sea in a process called Kalapani, which translates to black water. And then that process can only be reversed through an expensive ceremony called Shuddhi. And people of low caste did not often have the means or the motive to go back.

• 44:19Speaker 06

  I was going to say, why would they?

• 44:20Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 44:21Speaker 06

  Just to confirm the fact that they were a Dalit.

• 44:24Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 44:25Speaker 06

  And just one final point, Misha. I do not know how orthodox Hinduism, for instance, which is still very strong there, a Sanat and Herm, how that could have been maintained if it hadn't been for the minority of Brahmins who were taken to the Caribbean. Because they themselves were conscious participants in this process. Because they started in order to counteract, to make a living, but also to counteract the Christian proselytizers who had come in because they had a whole set of hedons there as they saw them. But those Brahmins soon started not only to minister in the homes of people who were

• 45:09Speaker 06

  known to be a very low caste, with whom they would never have associated with in India. Not only did they go to their homes to do their poojas and to do all the religious work and to recognise these people as human beings, but they also started to take cooked food from these people. And for me to take cooked food from you, if you're known as a Dalit or an untouchable, that itself was a social revolution of great significance. And for me, that is what epitomises this new identity that was being shaped.

• 45:44Speaker 05

  My thanks to Purba Hussain, Clem Sitaran and Neha Hui. Next week, the origins of cybernetics. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus

• 45:58Speaker 06

  material from Misha and his guests. Are you taping this bit or?

• 46:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, we keep this bit. So there are a couple of things that really struck me. First of all, we didn't, we didn't talk about Uganda. We didn't talk about what the long-term impact has been in politically in places like Uganda and Fiji in particular, where there's been real tension in the past 50 years or so and how that emerged. And the other thing that strikes me is that This is so reminiscent of something else that I've done some work on, which is the effectively indentured labour of Bengalis and Nepalese in particular, but also Filipinos

• 46:46Speaker 05

  into the Gulf states. It seems to me to be a very similar system. I mean, when you signed up for the indentured labour, did you, well, I mean, obviously you didn't have passports, but did you get any cash for it? Were there tangible benefits straight away for these people?

• 47:05Speaker 04

  On paper, every indentured migrant who signed up to join the trade got six months wage advance. Multiple people who came back and spoke to multiple investigative committees said that they never received that wage advance, or they received it from the labour recruiters and then some of it was taken away as sort of fee.

• 47:26Speaker 05

  Some middleman had.

• 47:28Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. But there was the idea that you could just get cash in hand immediately.

• 47:33Speaker 05

  Right. So, and did any of them take the money and run?

• 47:36Speaker 04

  Most indentured migrants were under quite severe surveillance before they moved onto the ships. They were kept in these warehouse kind of spaces on the ports known as depots.

• 47:49Speaker 05

  In Calcutta and in Mumbai and.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  In Calcutta and Mumbai and Madras and all of that.

• 47:55Speaker 05

  So, and how long would they stay in these warehouses?

• 47:58Speaker 04

  Five to six months, up to sometimes three months.

• 48:02Speaker 05

  So, there's been quite a bit of debate amongst researchers and scholars and presumably also descendants of indentured labourers about the balance here. You know, was this a replacement for slavery or was this actually something which facilitated opportunities for people? I mean, is that a live debate amongst scholars?

• 48:27Speaker 06

  Well, I think a lot of people hold on to this idea that this was a new system of slavery. I think the early period you discuss in your book, certainly.

• 48:39Speaker 06

  You know, there was slave-like conditions and slave-like practices on the plantations. But you can't extrapolate from that and paint the whole thing in that sense.

• 48:50Speaker 05

  Yes, because it lasted a hundred years.

• 48:52Speaker 06

  Yes, it lasted seventy-five to eighty years. And people were very enlightened, people understood, people were returning. Some who had returned went back to the Caribbean or went back to Fiji. Now, we knew little about this. As a descendant of indentured labourers, I had no idea until I was probably in my thirties as to where, what part of India these people came from. It was a closed book. As V S Naipal said, apart from the fact, as he put it memorably, that the poverty of these people, and if you go to India today, these still remain to the most deprived parts of India. Their poverty was immemorial.

• 49:37Speaker 06

  It went back many, many centuries. And here you had people, many of whom, certainly in the later stages of indentureship, were making a conscious effort to find a new life. But this was never discovered in families anywhere in the Caribbean.

• 49:55Speaker 05

  So, Puleba, how did people go about finding what their heritage was? What is the sort of record system? Is there an excellent system of records of who was moving and why? Yes, so there are multiple times in the indenture system itself where people's names were recorded. So the first time is when people are brought to the port cities. There are government officials, colonial officials, who take down things like name and where they come from, their village name or geographical space. For women, they often take down whether they're married or not. As they have pointed out, there are multiple women who were actually travelling.

• 50:33Speaker 07

  By herself, many pregnant, often giving birth on ships, often giving birth when they arrived, and as you say, many of them unaccompanied. So a lot of records were taken down, or were supposed to be at least, taken down at the port of origin. And then when you go to Mauritius, Guyana, they're supposed to also kind of check that those are the people who arrived, because there were many deaths on passage as well.

• 50:58Speaker 05

  So Clem, how did you track down your maternal grandmother?

• 51:02Speaker 06

  Well, I tracked down most of my relatives, because on their transport, the land that they own in Guyana, their names would be listed, but it would say Ex Avon 1884, which means that he came on the ship Avon in 1884. And if you go into the National Archives in Guyana, in Georgetown, Guyana, they have been there, I think. If you go, if you go there, you will see these volumes, which state the name of the ship and the year, certainly from 1865,

• 51:42Speaker 06

  not the early stages, but from 1865 to 1917. So once I had that information from the land transport documents, I was able to go straight to the ship's registers, which would state their names, the village from which they came, what district, yes, their caste background.

• 52:05Speaker 05

  They registered the caste background as well?

• 52:07Speaker 06

  Yes, they did. They did. And it would state where they came from. It would state who they were accompanied by. And then it would be penciled in, Rose Hall, Port Marant, wherever they were sent to, that would be penciled in.

• 52:23Speaker 07

  Also, whether they were re-adventured, whether they went back, what ship they took.

• 52:28Speaker 05

  Right, so you could track their career, pretty much. So there's some advantage to that bureaucratization of the colonial system.

• 52:39Speaker 06

  It's there. I mean, I would never have known, because this thing wasn't discussed, you see, for two reasons. One, the idea that you were all kidnapped in a way handled this feeling of animosity that Africans had, that these people had come in to swamp us and to, as they used to put it, took the bread out of our mouths. When we were about to embark on our freedom, these people came in as cab labour and we paid because one third of the funding of it came from colonial budgets. So they say, we paid to bring these people in to undercut us. So if you were going there to enter labour, you say, well, look, I didn't come to undercut

• 53:24Speaker 06

  you. I was kidnapped, I was tricked, I was fooled. So you sustain that.

• 53:28Speaker 05

  So that, that becomes the narrative.

• 53:31Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 53:32Speaker 05

  Everyone was kidnapped.

• 53:33Speaker 06

  One final, one final point to that.

• 53:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:35Speaker 06

  That within the family itself, we knew nothing. As Nai Paul said, I didn't know my great, great grandmother was pregnant on this boat and she came here alone to Trinidad. We weren't, they weren't going to discuss that past. That past was an area of darkness. It was never discussed because there were too many things hidden in that past. Personal reasons for leaving, conditions within the family and for women, two thirds of whom went on their own. And these were women, a large amount of them between 20 and 30. They would have been married, they would have had all kinds of family connections, but to revisit that was far too painful. So it was a cultivated area of darkness.

• 54:20Speaker 05

  Well, thank you very much. I think you've all deserved a cup of tea or coffee indeed, if that's what you want. And I think Simon is going to be making his.

• 54:29Speaker 06

  A shot of Guyana rum.

• 54:30Speaker 05

  A shot of Guyana rum.

• 54:32Speaker 06

  They make, they make a very good rum.

• 54:34Speaker 05

  I'm sure they do. If you've got any handy.

• 54:37Speaker 06

  Very good, very good. They make a very good rum. Who would you ever want to your coffee or you've got to go.

• 54:42Speaker 05

  I've got to go unfortunately. In Our Time with Misha Glenny is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production. Hello, I'm Jonny Diamond and I'm the presenter of the Radio 4 series, How Did We Get Here: Israel and the Palestinians. We explore the complicated backstory of that Middle East conflict as the region endures another wider war through conversation.

• 55:07Speaker 05

  With experts with a variety of perspectives. We travel back through the centuries to examine the history of the land that's now so contested between Arabs and Israelis. And we try and understand the past that's brought us to such a present. How did we get here, Israel and the Palestinians? Listen on BBC Sounds.

• 55:30Speaker 05

  Hello, Misha Glennie here. Did you know you can get episodes of In Our Time 28 days early with a subscription to the BBC website and app? Just head to bbc.com/subscribe to find out more.